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Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, I support the amendment. First, I apologise to the House that I have not been here so far during the passage of the Bill. This is a discrete issue about which I feel quite strongly. In principle, I support the registration of the birth of a child in the names of both parents, but there are a few exceptions. Those were raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas, who set out the case for the amendment extremely coherently and eloquently. A small minority of fathers misuse parental responsibility to the risk of the mother and child. I understand that in Committee the Government said that there was no risk to mothers and children from parental responsibility. I have to say that I disagree, from my own experience as a judge trying these very cases. I have tried a series of cases where, under the present law, fathers had to go to court and had to ask for parental responsibility. In a number of cases, I have had to say no. I remember one case vividly. It involved a girl from Liverpool whose father was a sexual abuser who abused her as a child. Her uncle was a sexual abuser who abused her and the child she bore. She went to live with a man who turned out to be a sexual abuser and she had to move again. She found yet another man to be the father to her child and he, too—can you believe it?—was a sexual abuser. The case came before me because he was violent to her and he was abusing the small child, and social services said that they had to take the child away from the mother. These cases happen. I know of another case where the girl was living with a man who made her pregnant. He was extremely violent towards her. She ran away to a refuge, where she was anxious, for obvious reasons, that he should not know where she was and he should not come near her or the child, who was born while she was in the refuge. Under the government proposals, if that man went separately to the registrar and asked to have his name added, he would automatically acquire parental responsibility. He would search the mother out and he might well be violent toward her. But it is perhaps more worrying that parental responsibility gives the man rights as well as responsibilities. He would have a right to tell her where he wanted the child to go to school. The importance of that is that, if he knew where the child was at school, he could be in touch with the mother and could be violent towards her, because he had found her. He could also be violent towards the child. Fathers, even fathers who love their children, are from time to time sufficiently violent that some children die. We have a record in this country of the death of something like two children a week by their father or stepfather. That is a very small minority, but the automatic granting of parental responsibility carries with it a risk from violent fathers. It is the child who is more important than the mother, but if the mother thinks that she will be injured—she may be—or thinks that the child may be injured, the care that she is giving to the child is less good than it should be, because she is always fearful of what might happen to both of them, and so the welfare of the child suffers from that fear. If the Government believe that the automatic granting of parental responsibility does not carry a risk for a small minority, I can tell them from my own experience as a judge that it really does. Whether this is the right formulation of the way to protect the mother and child, I do not know. I came late to this. I was alerted to the amendment and felt that I should express my view. I strongly advise the Government to look at this lacuna in their proposed new law to address the risk that another mother and child will be injured, or a child will be killed. This is a very serious matter and I support the amendment.