Children (Contact) and Adoption Bill

Following our receipt of the report of the Joint Committee on the draft Children (Contact) and Adoption Bill, I am pleased to say that the Government's response to that report is today being presented to Parliament. The Bill, which we hope will be introduced in the current parliamentary session, would take forward the commitment we made in the Green Paper, ““Parental Separation: Children's Needs and Parents' Responsibilities”” to provide the courts with more flexible powers to facilitate contact and enforce contact orders. At present, contact orders can be enforced only through contempt of court proceedings leading to fine or imprisonment. Courts have quite rightly been reluctant to use these measures because of the potential negative impact on the children involved. That is why they need additional, more flexible and realistic powers, of the sort that this Bill will provide. It will allow the courts to:"(a) direct parties in a contact case to undertake a ““contact activity”” such as attending information sessions, meetings with a counsellor, parenting programmes/classes, or other activities designed to deal with contact disputes; and""(b) attach conditions to contact orders which may require a party to undertake a contact activity." Where a contact order has been breached, courts will be able to:"(a) impose community-based ““enforcement orders””; or""(b) award financial compensation from one party to another (for example, where the cost of a holiday has been lost)." In addition, the Bill provides a statutory framework for the imposition of restrictions on inter-country adoptions from particular countries where there are concerns about adoption processes there. We are very grateful to the Committee for the detailed consideration it gave to this Bill, and were pleased that much of the report has chimed so closely with our own thinking and approach in developing the Bill. It was particularly helpful that the Committee considered some issues where we though that greater examination would be important, and we were pleased that the Committee agreed with us that the use of electronic tagging would be disproportionate. We will therefore remove that provision, which appeared in square brackets in the draft Bill, from the Bill as introduced. Most importantly, it is gratifying that the Committee has not recommended any change in the fundamentals of the Bill on either contact or inter-country adoption, and agrees with our firm belief that the welfare of children must remain the paramount consideration of the courts when determining any question in relation to their upbringing.