Courts and Tribunals Bill

Baroness Neate Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 27th October 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neate (CB)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to be part of this debate in which so much legal expertise and experience are evident. I too warmly welcome the noble Lord, Lord Stace, with his important expertise and experience. I will speak in support of Clause 16 and also mention some ways in which I believe the Bill could be further strengthened.

In the Children Act 1989, the Conservative Government took what was then a huge step for children by establishing the principle that children have rights, whereas parents have responsibilities. At that time, however, domestic abuse and the dynamics of power and control that sustain it, often well after separation, were not as well understood as they are now. In 2015, when the noble Baroness, Lady May, was Home Secretary, the country took a major step forward in creating the criminal offence of coercive control, which was further consolidated in the Domestic Abuse Act 2021. I mention this because we are learning as a country. What the present Government are doing, therefore, is bringing together our present knowledge of domestic abuse with the founding principle of the Children Act that the best interests of the child must always be paramount.

This change took a decade of ardent campaigning to bring about. The Minister and others have mentioned the incredibly courageous Claire Throssell. She and I launched the campaign when I was chief executive of Women’s Aid. As noble Lords have heard, Claire’s two sons, Jack and Paul, had been killed by their father during court-ordered unsupervised contact—contact that, importantly, Claire and her children warned the court might be lethal. These children were by no means the only ones to meet this preventable fate. Claire’s children and others might be alive today if abuse survivors and their children were heard and believed—they still frequently are not—and if the courts always treated the child’s best interests as paramount. The presumption of contact where there has been domestic abuse can facilitate post-separation abuse, which in turn impacts the non-abusing parent’s ability to parent and can lead to the child entering care.

Even now, the myth that the family courts are biased against fathers has huge traction over both people who appear in the courts and those who work in them. The highly organised activists who perpetuate that myth now are from the same mould as those who egged my house multiple times and slashed my tyres when we launched the campaign. That is nothing compared with what their heirs on social media threaten to women who expose the way our institutions inadvertently facilitate coercive control and abuse. I urge noble Lords in this House to retain a laser focus on children, whose best interests should indeed prevail in all cases.

However, this change alone will not be sufficient to enable the family courts to deal fairly with cases where there is domestic abuse. I urge the Minister to consider amending the Bill in some crucial ways. First, the need for effective regulation of experts providing evidence in the family courts has been acknowledged across specialist organisations and by judges. In particular, the highly contested concept of parental alienation is used in ways that wrongly discredit both survivors and their children. When I was at Women’s Aid, I met many survivors who had been ignored and belittled in court in the name of parental alienation—and little has changed. Just in the last few weeks, survivors have told the committee of this House scrutinising the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 that they suffered more in the family court than during the abuse itself.

Furthermore, in the Re C (‘Parental Alienation’; Instruction of Expert) judgment, the President of the Family Division, Sir Andrew McFarlane, stated that it was “unhelpful and potentially confusing” that the

“generic label ‘psychologist’ is not protected and may be used by any individual, whether registered or not”.

I urge the Minister to consider prohibiting the appointment of unregulated psychologists and psychotherapists to conduct a psychological assessment of any party or family member involved in child contact proceedings, and to ensure that all psychologists appointed as experts in the family court are appropriately qualified.

Secondly, despite domestic abuse appearing in 83% of private law children case files in the Domestic Abuse Commissioner’s 2025 report, research and survivor testimony show that there is a significant lack of understanding of domestic abuse by family court professionals. Judgments are less likely to serve the interests of children without sufficient understanding of how coercion and control—the heart of all domestic abuse—show themselves in the family court setting. The Government’s strategy for addressing violence against women and girls guaranteed training for all staff in criminal courts, but not family courts. I urge the Minister to mandate high-quality, trauma-informed training on domestic abuse for all family court professionals, including the judiciary.

I urge noble Lords to use this opportunity, when it comes, to reinforce the paramountcy of the best interests of children, and to reject misogyny and coercive control in the family courts by supporting Clause 16 and the other changes I have mentioned.