Children and Adoption Bill

I understand that if both parents are on legal aid mediation will be free, but I am not sure what happens when, for example, one parent is on legal aid and the other is not. I hope that the Minister will address the issue. Certainly we should consider it in Committee. The 10 per cent. of cases that reach the courts are those in which people need the most support and problem-solving. It may seem a small percentage, but in terms of numbers it represents a large tragedy. Each year there are 40,000 applications to the courts over child contact, and 70,000 breaches of child contact orders. That should concern us greatly. The consultation document issued by CAFCASS, ““Every Day Matters””, makes some good points about intervention. CAFCASS frequently intervenes too late, long after parents’ attitudes to each other have hardened, or long after one parent has created a new household excluding his or her former partner. Indeed, many attitudes have hardened long before the first court application—hence the need for even earlier intervention where possible. Arguments about the fine detail of contact arrangements occupy huge amounts of scarce professional time, often unproductively. Once a court application is made, there is a clear risk of an adversarial model of law being started. The consultation document illustrates why we must put such emphasis on early intervention. However, we must also make information easily accessible. The Minister mentioned the telephone helpline. I understand that booklets are available, but I wonder whether they are necessarily the best format for those who need to access information. I would like to know exactly what is available for parents at the moment and whether, for example, videos as well as printed leaflets are available. Research by the university of East Anglia and other research indicate that many of the parents among the 10 per cent. that go to court are very young, poorly educated and on low incomes with extremely young children. Partly because of their lack of education, they often find it difficult to communicate not only with each other, but with those who try to help them. There may be a deep lack of trust between the parents, a history of violence, or poor parenting skills. Parenting skills play an important part in preventing such situations from becoming adversarial, which is when worries arise about the vulnerability of the children. We agree with the Government—I have done quite a bit of that so far—that mediation cannot be made compulsory. One can put two people in a room with someone but, if they are not prepared to participate, one cannot make it work. However, we support the case for a compulsory referral meeting about mediation. We think that that is where the compulsion should take place. We argue that that meeting should be free, as we do not think that we can compel people to do something and then charge for it. I qualify that by saying that any meeting would need to take account of the principle that the welfare of the child is paramount.