Clause 7 - Risk assessments
Children and Adoption Bill [Lords]
10:30 am
Maria Miller (Shadow Minister (Education), Education; Basingstoke, Conservative)
I apologise in advance for my state of disrepair this morning; the bugs are migrating from one side of the Committee to the other—although in my case I fear that a four-year-old child may have more to do with it. Perhaps we should all be very British and blame it on the weather.
The amendments deal with the inclusion of risk assessment in the Bill, an addition made, I believe, in the Lords. When the amendment was discussed in the other place, it was stressed—and I agree—that it was a useful and important addition to the Bill to ensure that domestic violence and child abuse could be properly assessed as soon as they were raised as issues during the relevant processes.
In many ways, the inclusion of the clause provides a balance to the enforcement elements of the Bill. We want to ensure that the Bill is enacted in the best interests of the child. We have already debated the role of risk assessments. When we debated amendment No. 34, the Minister for Children and Families agreed with some of our arguments that risk assessments would not always be helpful; we had asserted that risk assessments would not always be in the best interests of the child.
Amendment No. 34 was tabled so that risk assessments would be put in place whenever an enforcement order was required. In response to that amendment, the Minister said:
“it would be too onerous on the court and would constitute considerable delay to require a risk assessment every time the court seeks to make an enforcement order, as many contact orders will be breached for reasons that have nothing to do with the safety implications of the order.”—[Official Report, Standing Committee B,16 March 2006; c. 95.]
Risk assessments are not always a useful tool but are they are an important tool to have at our disposal for those instances when we believe that the child is at risk.
We have to put risk assessments in place carefully because they have direct implications for the welfare of the child; delaying contact with a non-resident parent has obvious emotional consequences, so we should have to the fore of our minds the idea that risk assessments should be used only when it is in the best interests of the child. We support the amendments under discussion precisely because they have the welfare of the child at their heart.
Amendment No. 36 is simple and straightforward.