Child Contact Centres (Accreditation) Bill [HL]

Baroness Butler-Sloss Excerpts

Friday 3rd February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, I also congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, on bringing this Bill forward. It is important and raises important issues. I need to declare that I was patron of the NACCC when I was President of the Family Division between 1999 and 2005. I may, perhaps, have been to more child care centres—private and supervised—than anyone else in this Chamber. I went to them all over the country and was very involved with the Coram supervised centre, which sadly had to close for the lack of money, and I was partially responsible for the opening of a contact centre in a Baptist chapel in Swansea—so I was involved right round the country.

Child contact centres are enormously important and I just add a few words to what the noble Baroness has said about their importance. Private law centres make it possible for families in dispute to have the children meet the non-resident parent in independent, agreeable surroundings without the aggro that there is if they meet with both parents present all the time. I have a vivid recollection of sitting as a judge in Exeter, being expected to make a decision as to whether the children should meet their father in McDonald’s or the service station on the M5. I murmured, “What about a child contact centre?”, which neither parent had thought about. In those days, such families had legal aid, but now there is no legal aid for child disputes, except very rarely when there is either domestic violence or some exceptional circumstances. So you have the situation where two parents who cannot talk to each other and who bring every possible allegation against each other, go to the judge or the magistrate trying to show either that the child should not be living with the mother—it is generally the mother—or that the father is unsuitable to see the child. At the end of the day the judge, without the help of lawyers but almost certainly wanting the help of a Cafcass officer or welfare officer, will say, “Why can’t you go to an NACCC-accredited contact centre?”. As the noble Baroness said, I suggested this direction first when I was president.

Private law child contact centres matter. A very large number are accredited by the NACCC but, as the noble Baroness said, not all of them. There are valid grounds for saying that there ought to be accreditation of some sort for all private law centres, preferably from the NACCC.

As the noble Baroness said, supervised centres where the children are in care, or very often in interim care, are in a rather different position. In these cases local authority social workers take the view that it is desirable—thank goodness—that the children who are in interim care prior to a decision by a judge or magistrate on whether they remain in care should stay in touch with their parents, and sometimes grandparents. However, that staying in touch generally has to be supervised given the care proceedings. As the noble Lord, Lord Wills, pointed out, it is organised by local authorities through either an outreach or local authority organisation. These childcare centres are equally important.

The noble Lord, Lord Wills, has said almost everything that I was going to say about reservations. However, I share his reservations. A distinction has to be drawn in the Bill between private law centres and public law centres, as it were, where local authorities are in charge and where the children will not see their parents other than under the supervision of a social worker or somebody nominated by a social worker.

There is also the possibility of having informal settings in private law cases. In these cases families who can agree to a certain extent quite like informal settings rather than a named child contact centre. Therefore, the Bill goes a long way towards what is needed and I entirely support the wonderful work of the NACCC. However, it seems to me that the Bill goes a trifle too far. I very much welcome this Second Reading. I think that reservations will be expressed in Committee by the noble Lord, Lord Wills, and me on exceptions to accreditation by the NACCC. Barnardo’s has been in touch with me and, I suspect, with the noble Lord. It has comments on the Bill which should at least be looked at. That is why I have these reservations. However, I strongly support the concept of the Bill and the importance of regulation and keeping up standards. The only question is how far it should go.