Children and Adoption Bill [HL]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness because now I understand what she is trying to get at. When I read the amendment, I found it very difficult indeed to follow where she was going. I am grateful that CAFCASS does not come into this at all. This is the 90 per cent of families that we leave alone to get on with their lives, imperfect as those solutions often are. We need to make sure that advice, education and help are in the public domain at those most difficult points when people are in need. The reason why I am against prescription and everyone having to make the decision at that point—which is what I understand her to be saying although I may still have it wrong—is that, having talked to parents and to many children on the lines of Childline, I know that the situation changes over a period for everyone involved. It particularly changes for the children, who are slowly coming to terms with things that they did not understand at all at the beginning and do not understand very much by the time that they have to make decisions, and they often change that decision in the light of what they hear. To get those agreements written down or agreed in stone at an early stage is extraordinarily difficult. Of course we all think that parents should make those decisions, we all think that they should consult their children, and we all think that when circumstances change they should make sure that there is clarity in the agreement that they have. My experience is that human life, particularly human life in conflict, simply is not like that. We need to make sure that people have as much help as possible that they can choose to access, because it worries me that in a free society we appear to be suggesting that families in trouble have to do certain things that other families do not have to agree to. Many families who stick together are sometimes just as dysfunctional—and could do with a few agreements—as those who separate. I find the amendment difficult to support, but it may be that I do not understand it.