Children and Adoption Bill [HL]

Because this clause was not in the draft Bill and was not subject to consultation, I shall briefly take the time of the Committee to add one or two more points to what the noble Earl, Lord Howe, has said. In his answer to me on my previous amendment, the Minister described this as a personal service provided by the Government to the adopter. Like the noble Earl, Lord Howe, I take exception to that. Is it not the fact that this is a central authority charging for carrying out its statutory duties and obligations under international conventions? Is it not also the case that the most comparable service, which is that provided by the UK central authority, on the Hague convention on child abduction, is free? I return to a question that I perhaps did not put sufficiently clearly and I apologise for that. Are the Government charging £800—compared to the £11.50 it would be if it was a domestic issue—just for the processing of applications, or are they charging for the information service that is used by a lot of other people, including local authorities and prospective adopters who are never international adopters of children from other countries? As the noble Earl, Lord Howe, said, there is an increasing trend for children to be adopted by relatives. Some of those relatives are not wealthy people; they are people from some of the poorest communities in this country and abroad. They do not have £1,000. I am not sure that what the Minister said in his response to my earlier amendment deals with that adequately. Something feels profoundly wrong about this proposal. It is not always wrong for the Government to charge, but there is something not right about it. Unless the Minister can come up with some really good answers, which he has not done so far, we will need to probe this much further.