General matters

Andrew Selous Excerpts

Tuesday 21st December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Ms Stuart]

I am grateful for that intervention because it takes me back to when I first arrived in this country 35 years ago. One of the things that always struck me is that the Brits are extraordinarily happy to talk about the weather, but very reluctant to take any notice of it in their behaviour. I have seen Brits wearing flip-flops in the middle of winter, but I agree with the hon. Gentleman that that ought to stop.

[Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)]

Can the hon. Lady give us a rough idea of how much a set of four winter tyres would cost?

[Ms Stuart]

That is an important question. The issue is not only how much the tyres would cost, but how much people could save on their summer tyres. Furthermore, insurance companies say that the probability of an accident in adverse weather conditions goes up by 257%. There is the issue of avoiding accidents and the kind of snarl-ups on our motorways and roads caused by drivers—usually in continental rear-wheel-drive cars, the Mercs and BMWs, which were designed to have winter tyres—not being able to deal with not terribly steep inclines. The straightforward equation is that winter tyres probably do not cost as much as people think, and could save us a lot of money. The costs would depend on which tyre was chosen and whether one got a whole set of new tyres.

The industry says that in winter or when temperatures are below 7° C—that is, most of the winter—only 2% of people in this country drive cars with appropriate, winter tyres. In other words, 98% of people drive on unsafe tyres, so there is an argument for providing incentives for them to get the winter ones. At the moment, insurance companies are raising rather spurious points about whether winter tyres are modifications to the original tyres. I challenge the industry: just as there are rebates on house contents insurance if there are the right locks in a house, insurance companies should give rebates to those using winter tyres.

Furthermore, emergency services vehicles, whether ambulances or police cars, should as a matter of course have winter tyres because that would make them safer and save the country money; the practice should not be restricted only to some companies.

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[Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)]

Christmas is a time that parents look forward to celebrating with their children when they can. However, for many parents that is not possible—and I am thinking not only of our troops in Afghanistan, but of the 3 million children in this country who live apart from a parent and, in particular, of those who are caught in the family justice system. I think particularly of non-resident parents who are trying to get access to or have contact time, as it is called, with their children. This issue also affects grandparents, aunts and uncles to a very great degree.

Sadly, it is abundantly clear that the present family justice system is much too slow. Its processes are greatly abused by parents with no penalty or sanctions applied. It is far too expensive in many cases. One of my constituents, a father, came to see me to say that he had spent more than £8,000 obtaining a court-sanctioned contact order to see his children. He did not abuse that order, but it was not honoured and he could not get it upheld by the courts or the police. Unsurprisingly, he was then short of money to pay maintenance as he wanted to do.

The most vivid example of the failure to honour a court order came from a warrant officer who came to see me. He took his civilian overcoat off and underneath he was in uniform. On his chest was his badge of office—a crown, as those who have served in the armed forces will know—and he put the court order on the table in front of me with the crown of the court on it, stipulating that he should have time with his children every other weekend. That court order was not honoured, and it was not upheld by the police or the courts. He felt deeply let down.

[John Hemming (Birmingham, Yardley) (LD)]

Does my hon. Friend see merit in a default position, whereby both parents have a duty to maintain contact with the children without having to go to court first?

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[Andrew Selous]

We can learn a lot from countries such as Australia, which has a much more shared parenting approach, uses much more mediation and is generally more successful.

Another of my constituents is a young father who has a valid contact order in place. He previously had full custody of his little girl. He is not in any way dangerous—indeed, he is a devoted dad. He last saw his daughter in July. She cries out when she sees him and her grandmother in the local shopping centre, longing to be with him. He has tried since July to get a court date to see her before Christmas, but that has not been possible. He left my surgery in tears after I had updated him on what the family court service had said about his case.

Another constituent also had a valid contact order and on 21 June, the Monday after fathers’ day, he received a text to say that the mother of his child had disappeared, leaving no address. Even after a court seek-and-find procedure, no address was provided. A first court date was set in a court a long way away from where my constituent lives, but it was adjourned. When the case did get into court on 4 October, the proceedings were shambolic, the judge was not well briefed and the appropriate file was not there. The case was adjourned again until 30 November and, on 28 November, the mother succeeded in getting that hearing adjourned, as—allegedly—a medical report on the child was not ready. When my extremely persistent constituent finally got the case into court earlier this month, he found that the medical report was dated 18 November and had been available for the earlier court hearing, but of course there was no sanction on the mother. The courts allow difficult parents to deprive their children of a relationship with their father.

I am proud to be an MP for a Government who are radical and reforming in many ways, and I put it to the House that we need radical reform of the family justice system. We need a system that is much less winner takes all, less confrontational and less expensive; and we need a system that provides proper enforcement of court-sanctioned contact orders.

[Matthew Hancock]

Has my hon. Friend seen the Public Accounts Committee and National Audit Office reports into CAFCASS, showing that the extremely moving examples that he has highlighted today are not isolated cases but part of a wider problem in the family court system?

[Andrew Selous]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising that issue. He is right. The problem affects every single one of us in the Chamber and is an issue on which we need urgent progress. The input of mothers and fathers, where safe—that is the vast majority of cases—is hugely beneficial to children.

The language we use in these cases is extremely unhelpful. I really dislike the terms “non-resident parent”, which suggests some sort of absentee parent forced to leave their own home, and “parent with care”—why should one parent have to do all the caring? Is that not unfair to mothers, to whom it often applies? The term “contact” is a cold and unfeeling term for what is the strongest of all human bonds. Would “daddy time” or “mummy time” not be more appropriate?

On the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley (John Hemming), Australia takes a much better approach. Its approach, which was introduced hand-in-hand with reforms to the child maintenance system, is to regard a separated couple as two single parents, with the emphasis, wherever possible, on as much shared parenting as possible, not on one “parent with care” and a distant “non-resident parent”. That matters greatly, because there are very positive results for children when separated parents are involved in their children’s lives. Earlier this year, one of the most recent academic studies on this subject, by Fabricius et al, showed that when separated parents are involved to a greater degree with their children, it produces better school results, fewer suspensions and lower drop-out rates. There are clearly positive results to be had, so we need a real change of emphasis in this area. We need people in the public sector, such as general practitioners and teachers, to take the rights of non-resident parents seriously where the latter want to be involved in their children’s lives.

I would commend Australia again. In Perth in western Australia, it was found that one of the reasons parents with care were giving for not allowing contact time with children was their concern that the fathers would not be able to look after the children properly. As a result, courses in child health were set up for fathers to facilitate greater shared care—a very practical suggestion. I put it to the Minister, therefore, that on this issue we have made too little progress for far too long, causing far too much heartache to too many of our constituents. As I wish you, Mr Deputy Speaker, and all Members and staff of the House a very happy Christmas, I ask everyone to reflect briefly on those good parents who long to be with their children this Christmas but who will be denied that opportunity.

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[Elizabeth Truss (South West Norfolk) (Con)]

I realise that many colleagues’ minds will not be on the business of the House, but on their Christmas lunch. If they are still in search of provisions, may I suggest that they head to Norfolk, where they can find their entire lunch? If they should be stuck in Norfolk, because of the inclement weather—

[Andrew Selous]

Or because they do not have winter tyres.

[Elizabeth Truss]

Indeed. If hon. Members are stuck in Norfolk, may I suggest that they will be catered for? Not only will they be able to purchase their turkey, potatoes, Brussels sprouts and a mountain of vegetables; we also have the world’s biggest sugar factory, so dessert is catered for. A by-product of the sugar factory is the heat that it generates, and tomatoes are produced in the greenhouses there. There is cheese—the Binham Blue and the Wells Alpine—for the cheeseboard, and, for those after-dinner drinks, we also have the only English whisky distillery.

Norfolk is indeed a county of bounty, with 80% of the land used for food and farming. It often strikes me that if Martians were to come to Earth and watch prime-time TV programmes such as “Come Dine with Me” and “River Cottage”, they would think that we were all obsessed with food. They would imagine that we spent all day thinking about where our food came from and how it was produced. They would also believe Norfolk to be a dominant part of the British economy, with its strong food and farming industry. There have been excellent developments at local level. An example is the development of the Norfolk food hub, which I am assured will have goats grazing on the grass roof of its exciting new building, but there has not been a growth of food exports in relation to food imports. In fact, over the past 10 years, we have imported nearly twice as much food, relative to exports, as we used to do.