Family Justice

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mr. Beith) and the members of his Committee on producing an excellent report. It was well timed to some extent; there was a slight lack of synchronisation between some Government papers and the Select Committee's report, but I am glad that it has come together in a timely fashion. I considered the title of the report, ““Family Justice””, and my experiences of constituency surgeries and thought, justice for whom? Are we talking about justice for parents or justice for the children? Somehow one loses sight of the fact that there was a family unit. We need to proceed in such a way that we retain the importance of a family, even though they might not all be located in the same residence. That is a very important objective. Support for the family generally is very important and I declare an interest, although I wish it was greater than it is: I am a trustee of Poole community family trust, which I do not think will have any funding in the near future. The principle behind community family trusts of working on relationship education prior to partnerships becoming permanent—by, for example, working through checklists and in particular through providing relationship education in schools, which happens in quite a lot of other ways—is excellent. Those preventive measures are not part of the report, but are part of what I see as a lifetime raft of family support that can be accessed at appropriate times. When we consider the amount of support needed once a breakdown occurs, we realise that such early investment is crucial. It is clear that even if there is an irrevocable breakdown, if the parents have an amicable split the contact arrangements are that much easier to deal with. That is very important. I shall pick up on other aspects of support for families later. Another aspect that does not relate directly to the report is the suggestion that this whole area is under-researched. Do we know the extent of contact denial or breakdown? I wonder whether the Government want further research in that regard. I know that there is the Office for National Statistics work, but people may feel that all the work should be much more extensive. It certainly needs to be done in a sophisticated way. The evidence that I have seen is that rather different answers are given by the resident parent and the non-resident parent. Perceptions are different, which makes careful research all the more important. Sadly, some parents reach the point of irrevocable breakdown. The report and the Government response are all about how well the processes work in those circumstances and what we can all do—there is a great need for consensus in this respect—to improve them. As a background to the comments that I shall make, I want to make it clear that we would support the presumption that the welfare of the child is paramount. We would certainly want to take on board the United Nations convention on the rights of the child. In particular, the views of children should be sufficiently taken into account. I am also referring to the right of the child to be cared for by parents, the parents' right to exert parental responsibility in allowing their child to develop and evolve their capacity—parental responsibility is all-important in this—and the child's right to contact unless it is in their best interests not to have contact. Now that we have had ““Every Child Matters”” and the Children Act 2004, we have at the back of our minds achieving the five all-important outcomes for children. However, I have structured the order of my response slightly differently. I put safety issues at the top of my list of things to talk about, because I thought that they were all-important. I wanted then to consider mediation, contact, enforcement, resources and transparency, and I think that I have listed those issues according to my order of priority. The Minister has made a very big contribution to tackling domestic violence, and we have discussed the issue at great length. As regards contact and the safety of children given the frequent history of violence in those cases that come to court, the often-cited statistic is that in 2003, 16,000 cases involving domestic violence came before family courts, but only in 601 were contact orders refused. It is a difficult question whether domestic violence is under-recorded—some groups feel strongly that it is—or over-recorded. I shall return to that question. I am pleased to congratulate the Government on the fact that the availability of supervised contact centres is improving but, as the report points out, much more is needed in that regard; the current provision is inadequate. I am pleased that the Government responded favourably to the point made in the Committee's report about thinking about more innovative solutions: using children's centres and extended school and looking at facilities in different ways. I have no idea whether the resources that the Government are allocating will be adequate; I hope that they will. We have long felt strongly that any contact activity should be subject to careful and separate risk assessment to minimise possible risk especially to children and also to individuals involved, particularly women. The Joint Committee responsible for scrutiny recommended that before making contact or enforcement orders the court should explicitly be required to consider the safety implications for both the child and the parent of such an order. I am pleased that in the other place there has been an agreement to introduce mandatory safety assessments where accusations have been made—the Minister will correct me if I am wrong, and I look for clarification in her response. My right hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed mentioned the gateway forms. Why are we getting more reports of domestic violence? Have the forms encouraged people to come forward and say something or are people using domestic violence as part of the unfortunate game? I have had a very sad constituency case. My constituent suggests that the case is entirely trumped up; he has never been involved in domestic violence, but he feels that the form has affected the outcome of his case. He is particularly aggrieved because he feels that he has never had a chance to put his side. The mandatory risk assessment will be helpful, because I imagine that both sides would at least have an opportunity to present their points. That would all be part of the assessment and would be healthy for such difficult cases.