HL Deb 02 February 2005 vol 669 cc12-3WS
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education and Skills (Lord Filkin)

My right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Education and Skills (Ruth Kelly) has made the following Written Ministerial Statement.

Following the publication of our consultation response Parental Separation: Children's Needs and Parents' Responsibilities: Next Steps on 18 January I am pleased to say that the draft Children (Contact) and Adoption Bill is today being presented to Parliament.

This Bill takes forward the commitment we made in the Green Paper Parental Separation: Children's Needs and Parents' Responsibilities to provide the courts with more flexible powers to facilitate contact and enforce contact orders.

At present, contact orders can be enforced only through contempt of court proceedings leading to fine or imprisonment. Courts have quite rightly been reluctant to use these measures because of the potential negative impact on the children involved. That is why they need more flexible, more realistic powers of the sort that this Bill will provide. It will allow the courts, at any stage:

to refer parents to resources, including information meetings, meetings with a counsellor or parenting programmes/classes designed to deal with contact disputes; and

to attach conditions to orders which may require attendance at a given class or programme.

And where an order has been breached, the courts will also be able:

to impose community-based orders for unpaid work or curfew;

to award financial compensation from one parent to another where the actions of one in breaching a contact order have caused real financial loss to the other.

In addition, the Bill will provide more clarity in the law about the mechanism by which intercountry adoptions from individual countries may be suspended where there are concerns about child welfare.

I believe that this draft Bill, alongside the wider programme of reform set out in our Green Paper and the response document published on 18 January, will make a real difference to the family justice system in this country and help provide better outcomes for children and families faced with the difficulties of parental separation.