Clause 12 - Independent review of determinations

Part of Adoption and Children Bill – in a Public Bill Committee at 12:30 pm on 18 December 2001.

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Photo of Jonathan Djanogly Jonathan Djanogly Conservative, Huntingdon 12:30, 18 December 2001

Amendment No. 82 is relatively straightforward. There must be some sort of provision to deal with the formation of the panel and with the relevant procedures. As I have said, the panel should be established in the Bill, and if the panel is brought into being, the regulations made under clause 12 must be put into practice—hence the reasoning behind the amendment.

On amendment No. 83, we have already discussed what should count as a qualifying determination, and whether qualifying determinations should be created pursuant to regulations or established in the Bill. The Committee decided that it should be a matter for regulation, but subsection (3), which relates to the panel procedure, does not include any provision for time limits that should apply when a person wants to refer an issue to the panel. Furthermore, without the amendment, nothing in the stated procedure requires that regulations—regulations that we have not yet seen—should specify any time limits.

Given the need for fairness and transparency to encourage adoption and speed up the process, it would be appropriate to all parties to include a provision on time limits: for example, potential adoptive parents who want to complain to the panel will want to know that their appeal will be heard within a set period; conversely, we must also appreciate that the adoption

agency will want to know that its decisions are final and binding and that it will not have the threat of an appeal hanging over it for all time. For those reasons, it would be appropriate to include time limits as the amendment proposes.