Family Justice

: I agree. It is to the Committee's credit that the judges feel confidence in it. By their actions and preparedness to attend, the judges show that the Committee is seen as a space in which people can put forward their views and be listened and responded to in a committed and sophisticated way. I do not want to pre-empt the debate on Second Reading and in Committee on the Children and Adoption Bill, which will come to the House of Commons shortly. I am not sure that I can add value by rehearsing what will be discussed then—many important issues will be debated in the context of the clauses of that Bill—and some points to which I do not respond precisely will be the subject of legislation. However, I shall start by breaking that rule and talking about the paramountcy of the welfare of the child. The Government and I agree with, understand and accept the point made to the Committee by Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, the former president of the family division. We are always tempted to make many things paramount. The Government love to make plenty of things a top priority, and if we counted up our priorities, we would see that they were crowded at the top. However, when judges look at a case, paramountcy needs to mean what it says. A number of things cannot be paramount; if something is paramount, that means it is the top concern. There cannot be two top concerns, only one, and that is the welfare of the child. We agree with Dame Elizabeth's view on that. The debate around other issues such as the undesirability of contact when violence is involved creates an atmosphere in which light is generally shed before the decision about what is in the best interests of the child is made, as does the debate about the importance of children having contact with both parents, the resident and non-resident. All those things are paramount issues for debate, but when it comes to the process in court, we take the view that we should not disturb Dame Elizabeth's formulation, which is that there is one chief consideration—the welfare of the child—although the other issues are important. I would like to talk about openness, enforcement and judicial continuity and delay. I start with openness, an issue on which the Select Committee has made a real contribution. I think that openness will make a difference. Family courts are moving inexorably from being completely cloaked in secrecy to being in the open, and the Constitutional Affairs Committee plays a pivotal role in that transition. Let me say why that should be the direction of travel, and why we should move promptly in that direction. Of course the anonymity of the child will be important, but we know from criminal cases, such as those in which the victim has been subjected to a sexual offence, that it is possible to have open court proceedings with anonymity for the victim. It is possible to have open-court family proceedings with the child remaining anonymous. Actually, that is possible now under the court rules, because the judges always have discretion to waive the automatic presumption of the exclusion of the public and reporting restrictions.