Children and Adoption Bill

I had better make some progress, otherwise I shall speak for even longer than the Minister, which will get me into great trouble—[Interruption.] I am not criticising her. She generously took many interventions and I am not trying to be churlish. We are having a nice debate. You try to be nice and you get it thrown back at you, Madam Deputy Speaker—you cannot win. We are determined that the problem of breach of contact should be addressed once and for all, which is why we have done a lot of work to highlight it, through summits held at Westminster, amendments that we proposed to the Children Act 2004 and some key undertakings on contact provisions in our manifesto for the 2005 general election. When we scrutinise the Bill in Committee, we shall maintain the resolute and principled stance taken on the subject of contact in particular by those doughty fighters in the Lords for the interests of children, my noble Friends Earl Howe and Baroness Morris of Bolton. The Bill addresses two major but unrelated issues in respect of contact orders in part 1 and adoptions with a foreign element in part 2, as the Minister said. Although we have some concerns about the fashioning of new procedures for overseas adoption, there is a fair degree of agreement in principle, so we shall concentrate our fire, and our time, on the woeful inadequacies of some of the contact provisions. Let us consider the problem. Up to 200,000 children a year experience the emotional distress of their parents’ separation or divorce. That experience is likely to befall 20 per cent. of children before they reach the age of 16—the same experience affected me when I was 11. Members of Parliament are probably not good role models for parents trying to promote stable families. My noble Friend Baroness Morris said that if she was the subject of a CAFCASS report, she would be described thus:"““Works away from home, involving long and anti-social hours; appears more interested in everyone else’s children than her own; and spends long, hot, summer week-ends indoors writing speeches.””—[Official Report, House of Lords, 29 June 2005; Vol. 673, c. 255.]" Not a very good model for stable family life. Although 90 per cent. of separations are resolved without resorting to dispute in the courts, the remaining 10 per cent. can end up in protracted, messy and acrimonious legal proceedings, as the Minister said. There is much work for CAFCASS to do in producing 28,000 or so contact orders and writing 33,000 court reports, and we have concerns about its resource capability to cope with that work load, while acknowledging the improvements that we are beginning to see under the new board, which, with Baroness Pitkeathley and the new chief executive Anthony Douglas, is doing a good job after a traumatic first few years due to the Government’s poorly thought-through conception of CAFCASS in April 2001. From our surgeries, we are all aware of the pain of non-resident parents who are denied meaningful contact with their children and who often live in reduced circumstances that militate against proper relationships with the children. We see cases of multiple breaches of contact orders by the parent with custody, which require multiple and costly returns to court by the non-resident parent. There are horrendous cases of members of the extended family being shut out of the lives of children—especially grandchildren. I stress the important role played by grandparents who feel so much pain when splits go wrong. Grandparents who have given family members great support, acting as chauffeurs, babysitters and bankers, suddenly find after a split that they are left completely out of the equation.