Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, as she has indicated, the amendments moved and spoken to by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, concern legal aid for measures to prevent the unlawful removal of a child within the United Kingdom and for taking steps to remedy such a removal. They would add to similar existing legal provisions for legal aid to prevent and remedy the unlawful removal of children from the United Kingdom. It is important to stress that unauthorised removal from the United Kingdom is a crime, whereas, as has been acknowledged in this debate, one parent taking a child to another part of the United Kingdom without consent is not. Trying to navigate a foreign jurisdiction in a foreign language without a lawyer would also be considerably more difficult than trying to do something similar in the United Kingdom. That said, the noble and learned Baroness has, as ever, made a powerful and persuasive case. We have indicated that in future people should, subject to various important exceptions, be able to deal with their family matters themselves, without the benefit of taxpayer-funded legal aid. However, I certainly recognise that if you cannot even find your child because they are in the hands of an ex-husband, ex-wife or estranged partner, it may seem impossible even to begin that process. The emotional stress on people in such situations can be immense. Therefore, we are sympathetic to the concerns of the noble and learned Baroness, particularly the proposals to make legal aid available for Section 33 and Section 34 orders under the Family Law Act 1986 —that is, the seek and find orders and the recovery orders. Seek and find orders allow a court to compel someone who might reasonably know where a child is to tell the court. The court will then judge whether this information should be passed on to the left-behind parent. Obviously, if there are safety issues it might not be advisable to do so. Refusal to impart that information is treated as contempt. Thankfully, Section 34 orders are somewhat rarer, but they give the police powers to recover a child forcibly in emergency situations. As the noble and learned Baroness identified, we are not yet convinced that the associated prohibited steps and specific issue orders require funding. The same applies to registering an order made in one part of the United Kingdom in another part. I fully accept that the noble and learned Baroness is not trying to find a backdoor entry into private law matters. However, our concern, and the reason we are not yet convinced about this, is that these orders get us much more into funding a family case as a whole, including by preventing relocation. The issue here is that many cases involving children are in fact arguments about where a parent with residence might reasonably live and the effect that will have on contact for the other parent. Therefore, when we talk about prevention in this context, that is the kind of situation we are talking about. I know that the noble and learned Baroness, from her vast experience, would see it as that. However, sometimes when members of the public talk about prevention orders, they have an image of stopping a child being bundled into the back of a car. That is sometimes the description conjured up by ““domestic child abduction””. If the noble and learned Baroness is willing to withdraw this amendment, the Government will table at Third Reading a similar amendment that covers Section 33 and Section 34 orders, for international abduction as well as domestic. I am happy for officials in the Ministry of Justice to continue discussions with the noble and learned Baroness, which I know have been ongoing, as she acknowledged, on the exact drafting of that amendment.