Children Bill [Lords]
9:25 am
Mr Tim Loughton (Shadow Minister for Children, Family; East Worthing and Shoreham, Conservative)
Without repeating the Minister's superlatives in appearing to buy your favours, Mr. Benton, I echo her sentiments in saying how delighted I am to serve under your chairmanship, which I have not done before.
As the right hon. Lady said, this important Bill, which has cross-party support, provides a once-in-a-generation opportunity to get the legislation right, in the interests of all children. I echo her comments that the constructive engagement of hon. Members on both sides of this House and the House of Lords will help to get the measure right.
I will not give a profile of every member of the Committee, but I am delighted to have the support of my hon. Friend the Member for Epping Forest (Mrs. Laing), who has considerable knowledge of family matters and who speaks for our party on women's affairs. Other colleagues, too, have participated in debates on the Bill.
I agree with the Minister's comments that we will miss the hon. Member for Lancaster and Wyre enormously. He never shirks from balancing his comments about why measures are appropriate and should be supported with attacks on the past record of the Conservatives, and, especially, on my approach to matters; no doubt he will make similar contributions in his swansong in the coming days. He brings enormous knowledge to the House from his previous experience and from his activities with the all-party children's group, which has been so engaged in the Bill.
On the programming resolution, we are concerned about the length of time that has been allocated to the Bill. We would have liked more Committee sittings, particularly as the number of amendments and new clauses to consider has mushroomed in the past few days. I take the Minister's points about that, and she was good enough to contact me last week ahead of tabling the amendments, but the Government have tabled 13 new clauses, one new schedule and at least 55 new amendments, and it is a shame that we will not have more time to consider them. The outside bodies that are interested in the Bill and have engaged in its development, of which there are many, have also been given little time to respond.
I remind the Committee that the Lords started their Committee consideration on 4 May—some five months ago—so the Government have had a lot of time. I am also not aware that we have had new explanatory notes for any of the new clauses. The notes that accompany the Bill are dated 19 July, which was when the Bill received its First Reading in the Commons. There have been no new explanatory notes other than the rough description of the amendments that accompanied the Minister's letter to the Committee, and we have had no formal notes going into the detail of what some of the new clauses, in particular, will involve. I hope that as the Committee progresses, the Minister will as a matter of urgency provide us with more detailed notes on the amendments, so that we can consider them properly.
We tabled our amendments after Second Reading back in September, which has given the Government plenty of time to consider them. It has also allowed other Committee members to see what other amendments might need to be tabled and, in many cases, to add their names to our amendments. I might say therefore that we have been better prepared. I am concerned that we will not have sufficient time to consider many of the long-standing amendments that we and other Members have tabled to reflect some outstanding concerns of the upper House. Furthermore, I do not think that I have served on a Bill Committee that has had to consider so many new clauses. I hope that in the confines of the time available, there will be sufficient time to discuss them.
I am concerned also about clause 2, which we are due to debate later this morning. Clause 2 was completely revised in the House of Lords with all-party support. We agreed that the new version strengthened enormously the role of the Children's Commissioner, which was much more in keeping with the original intentions of Ministers, the Green Paper and all who want to see enhanced protection. It is a great sadness that the commissioner's powers are to be diluted again by a series of Government amendments.
Given the timings, it is also strange that the Government tabled a range of amendments on clause 2, when a more efficient way would surely have been to delete clause 2 and replace it with a new one. They seem to have tabled the amendments to mask the fact that they are destroying the clause, because in fact they will completely undermine the improvements made in the upper House. It is a retrograde step and has been described as creating a commissioner who will have the fewest teeth of all those in the United Kingdom and as one who will be all ears but no teeth.
We also have serious questions about the relationship between the England/UK commissioner and the other commissioners for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. We want clarification of how they will work, which may take up a lot of time in Committee. Another big subject on which we hope the Minister will provide far more detail is clause 9 and the database and information sharing. I believe that the provisions are a mess, and we will elaborate on that in speaking to our amendments and those tabled by other Members. It is clear that the Government have not completed their thinking. The Minister said that she hoped that further amendments to clarify the detail of regulations would be available by the Committee stage, but it is one of the few clauses on which the swamp of new amendments tabled by the Government last week has no effect. We want much more reassurance from the Minister before we can agree to clause 9. I know that other members of the Committee share those concerns.
There are many other issues to be raised, but I shall not go into the detail of them now, because we want to get on with the debate on individual clauses. However, I am slightly confused by the ordering of the amendments, although I am sure that that has been done quite properly and with extraordinary logic by the Clerks responsible for the Bill. I am not entirely sure, for example, why an amendment that I tabled to the last clause will be considered in relation to clause 1.
Last night, I embarked on what I thought would be an easy exercise of marking out who was responsible for which amendment. However, it required all my highlighter pens to come up with a colour-coded chart of who does what, and I am still baffled by the matter. I hope, Mr. Benton, that you will take the proceedings gently, or you may end up being as confused as some of the other members of the Committee. On second thoughts, however, I am sure that you will not, because otherwise you would not have been selected as Chairman of this august Committee.
I end by reiterating something that I said on Second Reading. The Bill is worth while, and it is a suitable response to the Victoria Climbie tragedy and to all the other tragedies that we are aware of, but which do not receive such a high profile. We all want to see many important measures in the Bill enacted as soon as possible. However, I fear that during the Bill's consideration in the House of Lords the overriding concern of the media and the outside world was the issue of smacking. Smacking is an important subject, on which we all have different views. The Conservatives have allowed a free vote on the matter, so we do not experience the same problems as other parties, but it is an important issue that was not originally in the Bill. I fear that the subject will completely overshadow and dominate all our proceedings on Report, but I am relieved that it has not entered into the Committee stage, thereby giving us more time to consider the important details of the Bill. I hope that hon. Members will respect that, and will not try to sneak in amendments during the Committee proceedings which could sidetrack our deliberations.
I look forward to considering the Bill. We must get it right, and we shall engage constructively and positively with other members of the Committee to ensure that the Bill that leaves the Committee is an improved version of the one—already greatly improved in another place—that came to it. I believe that we can improve it still further.