Children and Adoption Bill

I accept the general point being made and as I said, the documents have been published on the departmental website today, some four weeks in advance of when we expected to publish them. They are important and they will prove particularly important in Committee, where we will discuss the detail of what works and what does not. But as I said, I shall investigate why the Opposition spokespeople were not sent copies, which they should have been. As I said, both pilot projects are important in helping us to understand what works best for parents in avoiding the need to go to court. Where a court order does prove necessary, clause 2 offers a new power to ask the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service to monitor that order and to make sure that it is followed. If it is not, the court will hear about it. As many Members know from the experience of their constituents, in some cases, after the long and difficult process of a court dispute, a contact order is made only for it to be ignored. We have all heard sad stories of non-resident parents being unable to spend any time with their children, despite such contact having been directed by a court order, which is often obtained only after considerable struggle. We also know of cases where a non-resident parent is not complying with a contact order by not providing the contact that their children may well greatly need. Courts often find themselves with no realistic way to deal with this problem. The only sanction at their disposal is to hold the person breaching a contact order in contempt, leading to a fine or committal to prison, but they are understandably reluctant to do that because of the impact on the child concerned. The courts have told us that they need broader powers to address this problem realistically, and to respond to the circumstances of particular cases. In 2002, a committee chaired by Lord Justice Wall produced a report entitled ““Making Contact Work””, which called for these powers. The Bill responds to the recommendations made in that report. In addition to providing the ability to require participation in contact activities, clauses 4 and 5 provide new powers to respond to breaches of contact orders, in line with the recommendations in ““Making Contact Work””.