Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, I should like to congratulate the Government and also express my very deep gratitude both to the Ministers in this House and the other House for achieving a very sensible solution. I am also particularly grateful to the government lawyers who have done an enormous amount of work both for me and for those behind me, and for taking the trouble to deal directly with the former chairman of the Family Law Bar Association and the chairman of the ILPA in relation to a later amendment. I really am very grateful. However, I have a wish list—I might refer to it when the first government amendment that was accepted today enables a little more money to be provided—for two groups of left-behind parents. They are generally fathers, but sometimes they are mothers. One is preventing a threatened abduction in a family where both parents are still living together because neither parent has yet applied for a court order. The left-behind parent may be warned by another member of the family that the mother, generally, will take off with the child and that the father will never see the child again. That would require a prohibited steps order. I understand the thinking of the Government on why they will not deal with the matter now. However, I would like them to put it on the waiting list because it needs to be done at some stage. The second is where the mother—it is generally the mother, but sometimes the father—removes a child in a situation where there is not yet a residence or other order. That internal parental abduction case is not covered, either. I would like to put both those matters on the wish list and I hope that one of these days the Government will be sympathetic to them. However, the work that has been done, and the recognition by the Government that this should be dealt with, is splendid news, and we are all extremely grateful.