My Lords, this amendment raises an issue that has engaged academic legal discussion for about 18 years. I hear with some surprise the fact that some dramatic change was made in the case of Re J. That is not my impression.
There are, of course, two schools of thought, as there are in so many issues, even in family law. During the many years when I was a family judge, I heard many child injury and death cases and agonised over where the line was to be drawn between the protection of a child from significant harm and the importance for the child and the rest of the family of not removing that child from the family home on insufficient evidence. In the case that precipitated this amendment, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd of Berwick, pointed out, the seven members of the Supreme Court were in fact unanimous on this issue although they disagreed on some less important points, as I would respectfully call them. They decided on the balance of the bare facts of the case that they were against the removal of the children and that the threshold had not been crossed. Put at its simplest, this is a question of whether you remove a child on suspicion or go to the welfare stage on suspicion or whether you have to have evidence before you cross the threshold.
I was never a Supreme Court judge, but I respectfully agreed with the seven—