Welfare Reform Bill

There is one matter that concerns both me and Gingerbread. The noble Baroness said on Thursday, and has repeated today, that: ""We cannot permit a situation where the state knowingly acts in a way which puts the safety of a mother or her child at risk".—[Official Report, 2/7/09; col. GC 152.]" But this is what happens now when a man is allowed to register independently of a woman. Obviously his whereabouts will be known because they have got his address. If a registrar says to a woman—I do not know whether he gives her any guidance about how she should answer the question but he does not say, "Think carefully about this before you answer"—"Can you confirm that John Smith is the father of your child?", the woman would have to say, "Yes, but I do not know where he lives". The registrar could then say, "Well, we do, because he has just walked in. He is now down and he has now got parental responsibility". There is no safeguard in that situation. Our advisers say that that is an example of the state colluding with the loophole that the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, acknowledges as existing in the Bill, whether we like it or not. The Minister said that the department is not convinced by the cases it has seen; in other words, it does not believe that this is a serious problem. But, of course, this is new territory; it has not been tried yet and there may be real problems. We will be looking for more safeguards because, at the moment, the groups believe that vulnerable women will be put at considerable risk if this part of the Bill goes ahead unamended. Obviously, I cannot do anything other than withdraw the amendment. It is a nice phrase when we are urged to withdraw our amendments, but if we said that we would not do so, what would happen? The answer to this problem is to see whether the groups can refer the Minister and the department to more cases—I would have thought that they would have more—that might persuade her that there is still a real problem here. We shall return to this matter on Report but, in the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment 178A withdrawn. Amendments 178AA to 178BB not moved.