Grandparents' Rights: Access to Grandchildren

Yasmin Qureshi Excerpts

Tuesday 25th April 2017 Westminster Hall

[Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Streeter. I thank and congratulate the hon. Member for Northampton South (David Mackintosh) on bringing such an important issue before Parliament. His speech set out the various considerations associated with this sensitive issue.

Grandparents can enrich the lives of children and provide support to parents trying to balance work and home life. They can also be the only people who tell parents off—I remember it was great hearing my mum’s mum telling her off—and often grandparents are the ones who stick up for the children and give them treats and things. The importance of grandparents in the lives of children cannot be stated often enough. Many people who have been lucky enough to enjoy a close and loving relationship with their grandparents accept that it is one of the best experiences a person can have, as the hon. Member for Solihull (Julian Knight) said.

However, family relationships sometimes break down. Having worked in family law, I am well aware of the pain and distress that frequently accompanies family breakdown. At its most extreme, it results in children being taken into care. Where there is a responsible grandparent available who can step in and avert that outcome, that is surely to be welcomed. A more frequent occurrence, as hon. Members have said, is grandparents becoming detached from their grandchildren when the parents separate. When that happens, grandparents who have been a central part of the child’s life can feel understandably excluded. It is quite right that they should have some form of redress to apply for access.

The current means used to decide where a child lives and with whom they have contact is child arrangements orders, which were introduced by the Children and Families Act 2014 to replace the previous framework of contact and residence orders. A child arrangements order can determine where a child lives, who a child spends time with— those persons are named in the order. It also details who they can make phone calls to, who they can visit and what activities they can do with a named, specific person.

Under the present system, the grandparents have to seek leave from a court to apply for a child arrangements order, and only if they have lived with the child for three years. The application generally requires leave from the court. That can cause a lot of problems. The stipulation of having stayed with the child for a minimum of three years can exclude various different arrangements, such as those applying to grandparents who have not specifically spent three years with the child, but are on the scene and see the children and provide a lot of support.

Over the past number of years, it seems that the number of grandparents applying for rights of access has gone down. That is unusual, bearing in mind that a lot of grandparents want to have access to their grandchildren. One reason is that they have to jump through the hoop of applying for leave, then going through the process, which can be quite costly and time-consuming. Many grandparents are not able to avail themselves of the process.

The Labour Government produced a Green Paper in 2010 with the intention of removing the requirement to seek the leave of the court, and a family justice review was set up in March 2010. That provision was supported by the coalition Government, who ordered a review in November 2010. However, they took the view that the need for grandparents to apply for the leave of the court before making an application for contact should remain. That is a plausible explanation for why the number of grandparents applying has reduced.

Obviously, everyone wants to prevent vexatious claims from grandparents or people doing it for malicious purposes—we want to ensure that those who go for it do so with the best motives at heart—but I am sure that if people in the legal profession put their heads together, they could come up with an acceptable halfway house. Perhaps we could offer free legal advice to grandparents about their options, or make the process simpler and speedier.

[Jim Shannon]

As elected representatives we look for solutions to problems, and one way of finding a solution is through the mediation process. Does the hon. Lady think that that might be a way of doing it? I am looking to the Minister for an answer to that, too.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

That is a helpful way to deal with these things. Arbitration or mediation has been found to work in many scenarios—whether for the divorce settlements of couples who are separating or for access to children, even if the person is in employment. We could explore that option, which is not expensive and is much more straightforward.

As I said, I am sure that if legal professionals and others in the system put their heads together, they would come up with a system that is much more flexible and responsive to grandparents’ needs and enables them to see their grandchildren without enormous legal obstacles and hoops that they have to jump through. This is not a party political issue: everybody accepts that grandparents have a very important role to play. I am sure the Department can come up with a more flexible, less costly solution that requires grandparents to jump through fewer hoops.