Police and Justice Bill

The Minister indeed gives me a good deal of comfort and I know that, in many ways, not so much divides us. However, there is a division in the sense that the implication is that effective intervention to support parents and children at risk of ASBs starts with the parenting contract. Our position is that there is whole raft of possible interventions—the Minister just mentioned ABCs—that could and should be brought into play long before then so that real prevention is in place where it is needed. The Minister pointed out that there are all too many cases in which a family has reached the point of a parenting order with the kind of court involvement and coercion that that involves, and it is the first time that it has received help of any kind. On the one hand, that is greatly to be regretted, although I also acknowledge the great success, as I said in my opening remarks, and the real value and worth of parenting contracts and parenting orders. I intervened really to say that even a parenting contract is undesirable and perhaps heavy-handed, because all sorts of other forms of support are available, at least in theory, before such a process is brought to bear.