Children and Adoption Bill

I am sorry. It is rare for me to be accused of not speaking loudly enough. I referred to and commended two recommendations that we made in Committee. They consist of checking the safety of the child at every stage. I mentioned the thematic review, which showed that CAFCASS paid"““a worrying lack of attention to safety planning in almost all the observed sessions””." I was pleased that the Minister said that CAFCASS is now receiving plenty of resources. It will have to change its culture if it is to move from report writing to active solution seeking. It needs beefing up. The thematic review makes the point that if we have existed with a family court system in which the stars representing the social workers, the sense of both sides to a dispute and the expertise acquired has never paid sufficient attention to safety planning, that speaks volumes about keeping children’s safety paramount. Even the officers charged with the task of recommending welfare outcomes have not had that requirement as high on their agenda as they should. My second concern about the Bill is the absence of the paramountcy principle from the provisions that deal with enforcement against a recalcitrant parent. Clearly, the point is to enforce, but orders for contact can only be prospective. The judge works out the likely way in which it will happen but events can call safety into question. For example, something could alarm the mother or make the child afraid so that it does not want to go, and she says, ““I won’t go through with it.”” At that point, enforcement is directed at dealing with her. If the paramountcy of the interest of the child is lost then, we lose a good deal of the point of the Bill. That is deeply worrying. An individual needs to be punished but that should not undermine the paramountcy of the child. We are back to the point that the Bill is intended to tackle. The courts do not easily send a primary carer to prison because that is bad for the child and we are trying to get away from that model. The courts might express concern that, if they make someone do unpaid work at a time when they would otherwise take the child to a football match or do something nice, it undermines the welfare of the child. However, I believe that we could give the courts a strong steer and emphasise using reasonably civilised means to enforce an order, which the court remains assured is in the interests of the child. That model is compatible with the paramountcy of the welfare of the child. If that does not remain at the top of the agenda, we are worried that punishing the person will be put first and the child’s welfare will be lost along the way. I hope that those who serve on the Committee can ensure that the paramountcy principle is included in the relevant provisions. Section 122 of the Adoption and Children Act 2002 about representation for children has been mentioned. It has not been implemented and I understand some of the criticism from Conservative Back Benchers. There is no doubt that all the joint charities believe that it is crucial that the courts hear and understand the child’s wishes and feelings about the circumstances to help them decide what would be safe for the child, yet the Bill neither implements section 122 nor orders separate representation when there is risk. The lobby groups say that separate representation should be considered in all cases where there is a risk and that courts should ascertain children’s views in all cases. In principle, I agree strongly. However, I ask a question that I hope will be considered in a broader context than simply that of the Bill. How do we do that? In cases involving an older child, we can get the kid to give evidence if we have to, although that is not necessarily desirable. Such evidence could certainly feed into a social worker’s report in some way. But what about the younger children? And what about the 5,500 out of every 40,000 who are subject to the threat of child abuse or a lack of safety? They need to be able to make an input into the question of contact, and they need to be able to articulate what has happened to put their safety in danger. That can be hugely difficult. That question is reflected in the criminal justice system, where case after case is brought involving allegations of abuse of young children, usually as a result of physical evidence, which might not be totally compelling, or concerns about the child not thriving. In other cases, a sibling might have said something, or the child might have said something to mum or dad to cause real concern. But how can a child be facilitated to express what has happened to them, and to give that kind of evidence, which is highly material to a prosecution but equally material to the tortured issue of contact where there might have been child abuse? There is a provision in the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999 for intermediaries to be supplied to help people who cannot communicate in the normal way to put their evidence before a court. That is used for a variety of vulnerable groups. I had the privilege a few weeks ago of visiting the Barnardo’s Bridgeway project in Redcar. The project deals with what it calls troubled children. These are children who are suspected to have been abused. Its primary role is to unearth what has really happened, in order to help the child to deal with it and to give them counselling. It is that unearthing of what has happened, by using very clever methods, and then being satisfied as a professional that is has indeed happened, so as to know how to tackle it through the right kind of counselling, that offers a potential medium for getting complaints of child sex abuse before the courts. I had a pretty limited opportunity to get to the depths of how those professionals work. Through the use of toys, books and pictures of a specific kind, they try to get the child to go back through the experience, to see whether they respond to anything that registers that they have had an abusive experience. For instance, rather than asking a child a complex question such as, ““How did you feel when that happened to you?””, they have puppets that represent different emotions. This is just one example of how ingenious these methods are and the potential that they hold. The child would be asked which puppet was there at the time of the experience, and they might hold up the sad puppet or the angry puppet to show that that was how they felt. Or they might hold up the happy puppet, which would show that there was nothing to worry about. I am not suggesting that we use puppets in court—I think that my colleagues in the legal profession might be a bit worried about that. However, I am suggesting that we all have a big responsibility, in confronting the inability to get children’s testimony in these cases, to consider how those kids are not being protected because their testimony cannot be brought forward, and to examine some of these very clever methods, including those being used in the Barnardo’s Bridgeway project. We need to acknowledge that, if they represent a well researched and methodologically sound way of getting reliable information about child abuse out of a child, so that an expert can then report it in court, that could be a way forward. I do not blame the Government for not introducing that part of the earlier Bill. It is easy to say that there should be separate representation in all circumstances, but a lot of questions remain about how exactly that should be achieved. I welcome the Bill immensely. My only reservation is whether we have put safety sufficiently at a premium. Let us cleave to the paramountcy principle at every stage, and let us not lose sight of the opportunity that the Bill offers us to open the door into the world in which some children—not all, but a substantial proportion, as the figures show—suffer from abuse and from the spin-offs of domestic violence. Let us give serious thought to how we can, from now on, try harder to get children’s voices properly heard.