Children and Adoption Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 128:"Page 12, line 9, leave out from first ““in”” to second ““the”” and insert ““any particular case,””" The noble Lord said: In speaking to this amendment, I shall speak also to Amendments Nos. 129 and 138. I am informed that the amendments ensure that the original policy intentions of the Bill are put fully into effect. Amendment No. 128 in Clause 10 provides that any intercountry adoption case can be treated as an exception to special restrictions applying to intercountry adoptions regardless of whether a particular child has been identified for adoption. Current drafting is inadvertently restrictive of this power by being conditioned on ““the bringing in of a particular child””. Amendment No. 129 restricts what the clause defines as a Hague convention case to where a child is,"““intended to be adopted under an adoption effected under the law of a Convention country””." This is one of the contexts in which an appeal for an exception to special restrictions can be made. Previously it had also applied to where the child has been adopted in the same way. The unamended Bill is inconsistent with the policy intention, because exceptions to special restrictions would not be offered retrospectively. If an adoption process contravened special restrictions, it would have been stopped before the child was formally adopted; if it was at a sufficiently advanced stage when restrictions were put into place, it would have been permitted and there would have been no need for an appeal. Amendment No. 138 ensures that the amendment made by Clause 13 to the Children Act 1989 lifts the responsibility of local authorities to subject Hague convention adoptions to private fostering regulations in the same way that the Bill as it stands does for non-convention cases. The unamended Bill would lift this for non-convention cases only. The amendments simply bring the Bill into line with the original policy intentions. On Question, Amendment agreed to.