Children and Adoption Bill

The right hon. Lady needs to speak to her colleague in the upper House, Baroness Scotland, because, on 16 November, the day after consideration of Report in that House, she said in response to one of my noble Friends that a presumption ““is only a presumption.”” That answers the Ministers question. That does not fetter the courts. The issue is up for interpretation and a presumption is only a presumption. The system that we are talking about is best served if we can avoid reaching a certain stage by means of prevention. The best solution to acrimonious legal disputes is to prevent them coming to court in the first place. We favour concentrating more on preventive action, which keeps families together. We need to see much more work undertaken by properly resourced professionally trained social workers, who spend more time not fire fighting if something goes wrong, but more time on preventive action to keep families together in the first place rather than pulling them apart. For example, Kent has done some excellent work in that regard. That is one reason why the number of children in care in Kent has fallen dramatically. We need also to achieve an agreed settlement earlier. As my noble. Friend Earl Howe said in the other Chamber, there is a simple truth associated with contact disputes: if both parties to the dispute are content with the amount of contact that they have with the child, there is no longer any dispute. We must also agree to some form of mediation. We will have further debates about the extent to which that mediation should be imposed on, or agreed with, the parties. The Government initiated the promising form of mediation in what was called the early interventions project in the autumn of 2003. It was a successful and imaginative project. The prototype was due to be up and running by 2004, with a national roll-out by 2005. The aim was to defuse parental battles and dramatically to reduce the number of court cases. The project was mysteriously abandoned and replaced with the ill-thought-through family resolutions pilot project, which has been mentioned, having been scuppered by the Department of Education and Skills. Perhaps the Minister can give us more detail on that, though that happened under her predecessor. The family resolutions project, which ran for one year from September 2004 to 2005, with three pilots in London, Birmingham and Brighton, cost more than £300,000. Thousands of couples were expected to come through the process but only 47 couples started the process and only 23 of them finished it. We have already heard about that independent evaluation. As The Guardian put it, that project was a waste of time. That was a great shame because it replaced something that was rather more worth while. We need to set up an expectation that mediation will be used to try to get things sorted before they come to court. We think that it should be close to mandatory for parents to embark on mediation processes before they come to court, and that if they refuse to take up the offer, that should go on their record. Hence my intervention earlier about differentiating between a partner who is perfectly happy to go along with the mediation process and the other party who decides that they will not have anything to do with it, with the result that both parties are subjected to court proceedings. Surely that must count against somebody who had refused unreasonably the mediation process and count more favourably to the person who was prepared to go along with it. We want the early interventions project to be restored—it should be given a fair chance. That confidential mediation process would be privileged and could not be cited in subsequent court proceedings. However, there are question marks over the limited financial incentives for divorcing parents in opting for mediation. We are also concerned about the availability of people who are skilled in mediation within the Courts Service. There are many examples of where a more compelled mediation service has brought about dramatic results, particularly in Virginia where mediation has shown that after 12 years 30 per cent. of parents who had attended mediation were in weekly contact with their children as against only 7 per cent. who had been through litigation and had shunned mediation. This shows that mediation does work.