Children and Adoption Bill [Lords]

You, Mr. Speaker, better than most, will understand that those of us with other duties in this House sometimes have difficulty in participating as much as we would like to do in all aspects of legislation. I have studied the Bill on paper—only on paper, not in the Chamber—and followed its processes in the House of Lords, on Second Reading in this House, in Committee and, finally, this evening. It is with a very heavy heart—I say this curiously, in a sense—that I rise to support my friends on the Front Bench, because there is much of merit in the deliberations behind the Bill and, indeed, in the Bill. However, the fact is that, on its Third Reading, it is still deeply flawed. After all the effort that has been put in—I believe with good will—by both Government and Opposition Front Benchers in both Houses, that is tremendously sad. It is one of the difficulties of these Houses that after a Bill starts in the House of Lords and is passed on to the House of Commons—where it is studied and read—has its Second Reading, its Committee stage and its Third Reading, it has nowhere else to go other than on to the statute book, or out. I sense that tonight, there might have been a willingness among Members in all parts of the House to send the Bill somewhere else and to think again. However, and as you have pointed out, Mr. Speaker, this is a Third Reading debate, so this is the full stop and, as things stand, we have nowhere else to go. As my Front-Bench colleagues have suggested, the fact is that elements are missing from the Bill. You admonished, Mr. Speaker, the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke), who spoke for the Liberal Democrats, for commenting on what were almost Second Reading issues. Of course, we have to comment on what is in the Bill, but we must also comment on what is not in it and on the opportunities missed, to use the phrase coined by my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton). There are issues relating to the rights of parents and grandparents that have not properly been touched on. It might surprise you to learn that I am not yet a grandparent, Mr. Speaker, but I wish I was. However, like most of us, I have constituency advice surgeries to which grandparents come to plead a cause. If the Bill is about anything, it is about children, and such grandparents can offer an opportunity to children who are the subjects—I hesitate to say victims—of broken marriages. I suppose that, at this point, I ought to place my own interest on the record. I am a divorcee and I have a daughter who is the victim—if that is the right word—of a broken marriage. Happily, my former wife and I managed to work together to look after our daughter. My current wife was a single parent—the father of her child was murdered. I adopted my eldest son. I feel quite strongly about these matters. The relationships—and the contact—between people and their children are vital, but the most vital issue is the children. To come back to the point about grandparents, we are missing an opportunity. The Bill does not say that grandparents have rights. We were talking about mediation. You were otherwise engaged, Mr. Speaker, but, in a brief intervention just before the last guillotine, my hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs. Miller) sought to indicate the breadth and the depth that mediation might embrace. However, that is not in the Bill. We ought to be talking about creating opportunities for people to get together, not to fall apart. In the interests of the children, we ought to be talking about how we can maximise the contact between the two parents—if we believe, and I think that the House still does, that fundamentally children need two parents and the love, affection and attention of two parents. We cannot achieve that by compulsion; we can achieve it only by the getting together of willing parties. We will not get willing parties together by forcing them into funnels of courts of law, where they are represented by people who may think that they are presenting the interests of children, but who are in fact presenting the interests of two separating people. Children need the support of a flexible system. I am very sorry. I believe that the Minister is committed to the cause. I happen to think that my hon. Friends on the Front Bench are committed to the cause. I wish that the Bill could go somewhere other than to a Third Reading vote to say yes or no, but it cannot. The Bill is flawed. As my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham has said, it is an opportunity missed. On that basis, with a very heavy heart, I will have to oppose a Bill that has much merit in it, but does not go far enough.