Children and Adoption Bill [HL]

My Lords, I will not speak about parenting plans, but I want to say a quick word about mediation, because it is a word that is banded out and has many meanings depending where you stand on the professional spectrum. There is a real misunderstanding about the role of mediation as a cure-all, and this persists and is apparent in many of the amendments. It might well be mediation-plus, and I am joined with this by many people in CAFCASS. I apologise to the House for failing to declare my interest in CAFCASS. Traditional mediation—which I understand as a professional involved in a range of these issues—would make little dent on the families we work with. That is the view of the CAFCASS chief executive. Our models of dispute resolution increasingly involve the children, facilitated discussions and the use of therapeutic mediation models, such as the Relate model, but these are active and assertive rather than the traditional passive model. I have a real concern that we get into the right kind of pilot models and not into models that will not work. I am sure early intervention is the right process. There are a number of models on the shelf—one of which I am very familiar with—which might well be looked at again. But these are about practice rather than legislation. Your Lordships have great faith in legislation—we have a lot of it. I hope that we can also measure implementation because that is what matters.