Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, this is an important government amendment on an issue that has been the subject of considerable debate in your Lordships' House and indeed, in the other place, on legal aid for cases of domestic child abduction. We have always been clear that legal aid should be available to both prevent and remedy international child abduction and, as indicated on Report, we have been listening sympathetically to the powerful arguments about legal aid for domestic child abduction. We agree that the unusual nature of these cases, including the terrible impact on those involved, means that legal aid is justified to find a child who has been unlawfully removed within the United Kingdom. We think that our amendment, which has been worked up in the light of discussion with the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, achieves this. One point that the noble and learned Baroness has asked the Government to put on the record, which I am happy to do, concerns what we mean by unlawful removal. Unlawful in this sense has a civil rather than a criminal meaning, so if a parent with contact tried to take a child permanently from the parent with residence, that would be unlawful. I should add for the sake of completeness that our amendments also add recovery orders under Section 34 of the Family Law Act 1986 to a list of remedies for which civil legal aid is available in international child abduction cases as well. We can see the potential relevance of such an order where a child has been removed from the parent with residence but not yet from the United Kingdom, so the final international removal might still be prevented. Another small technical amendment relates to what are described as Section 27 applications. Legal aid will be made available for the narrow associated issue of registering an order made in one part of the United Kingdom in another part of the United Kingdom if it has a different legal jurisdiction. I beg to move.