Children and Adoption Bill [HL]

My Lords, as I made clear, I am not arguing against the paramountcy principle. In many cases there is no question of violence or risk to the child. but the non-resident parent cannot get the court to agree to extra contact. The reasons adduced are not what most people would regard as substantive. The noble Baroness, Lady Ashton, resisted the idea that we could have a countervailing presumption to the paramountcy principle. If Ministers are really saying that, why on earth has the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, devoted considerable effort to setting out, in Grand Committee and in correspondence, the case law that clearly shows that there is already a presumption countervailing the paramountcy principle. It is a presumption of contact—not ““reasonable contact””, however. That presumption appears to exist perfectly happily side by side with the paramountcy principle. The courts have no difficulty operating on that basis, and the legal advice that I have received is that they should have no difficulty operating with a presumption of reasonable contact provided, as I propose, that that presumption is treated as subordinate to the paramountcy principle. Apparently, according to the Government, we can have a presumption in case law, but not in statute. I frankly find that incomprehensible. It was said by a number of noble Lords, including the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, that they were worried that a presumption of the kind that I am proposing would increase the risk of harm to a child. That is not the experience in Florida, and nor would it have been with the original early interventions project, which would nip in the bud any genuine risk of violence by having an early hearing on that issue. I was pleased that the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, agreed with me on that point. The Government really cannot dismiss out of hand the success secured by other countries that have adopted early intervention principles; the track record over more than 10 years is proven. I have read the critical passage of the HMICA report, and I have read a great deal of the rest of the report. One reaches the conclusion that it is not the presumption of contact that is wrong but the lack—if I may say this without sounding too critical—of proper procedures to evaluate allegations of violence. I am afraid that reading that report did not put me off my stride. The Minister does not accept that the courts act unreasonably; indeed, what she said carried the implication that everything that the courts did was inherently reasonable because they had to act in the child’s best interest, and that every order is in the child’s best interests irrespective of what it is. That is an extraordinarily Panglossian view of the world, which really does not bear close scrutiny. The Minister admits that we lack detailed statistics of what the courts actually do in contact cases, but those statistics that we do have are apparently dismissed as of no account. I emphatically cannot go along with that.