---

Children and Young Persons Bill [Lords]

As time is limited, I will aim to say everything that I want to say in about three minutes to allow for three minutes for another speech. Hon. Members will be aware that I chair an organisation called Justice for Families, which concerns itself with failures and miscarriages of justice in the family courts. This debate is like ““Groundhog Day”” in that we are again talking about all the various processes such as kinship caring that we wanted to achieve years ago, but that still do not happen. In essence, that comes down to a failure of accountability. Tomorrow morning, as part of an all-party group of MPs, I will table two new clauses, one of which deals with how people take advice in the family courts and the accountability of the process while maintaining confidentiality. The other deals with how we scrutinise the decision-making process in the family courts. We will not be allowed to attack that particular aspect, which is covered by section 31 of the Children Act 1989. That section is in part 1 of that Act, while parts 2 and 3 are covered by the Bill and can therefore be amended. It is important to listen to people such as the hon. Member for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood (Mrs. Humble), who obviously understands what is really going on in this very complex process. Unless we find a mechanism for making all the practitioners—not just the good ones—follow the law, do things the right way, use independent advocates and avoid people perverting the course of justice by threatening to take their money off them, we will be wasting our time producing new statute, because it will be ignored by the worst practitioners. Another problem is that those practitioners are required to follow the Government targets, although I accept that the Government scrapped a lot of those targets from 1 April. The critical issue is one of accountability and following the law. Unless proposals for that are included, we will have all the nice, fine words but things will continue in the same vein.