Children and Adoption Bill [HL]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness for raising this incredibly important issue. I am the Minister responsible for the Hague Convention, so I am delighted to be able to discuss it. I have got the PACT report. I have no views about PACT as an organisation; it seems to be doing an extremely good job. I have already committed my officials to talking to PACT, because a lot of the issues that have been raised by both noble Baronesses should be dealt with by good conversations about what happens. We fund an organisation called reunite, which offers help and support 24 hours a day, seven days a week to parents who may find themselves in this situation. I take on board the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, about what more we could do to give parents greater support by knowing about other situations that have been relevant in particular countries. We keep a lot more statistics than we publish, and the reason why we do not publish them is that we have grave concerns about identifying the children involved. So we know a lot more; I know about all the individual cases that come to my attention. We are keen to ensure that this is kept under review. I do a lot of work with my counterparts in Europe where we may have a particular issue with an individual country where you can see from the statistics that perhaps more needs to be done. We have bilaterals going on between officials and between me and my fellow Ministers to raise issues and try to deal with them speedily as possible. Noble Lords know that my department acts as a ““central authority”” to process applications and to provide information to parents. I cannot get an answer in time on the specific question about legal advice, so I shall write to the noble Baroness.