THURSDAY 24 FEBRUARY 2005

Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss and Mrs Justice Bracewell

  Q100  Mr Chidgey: So what would you suggest; that there is some enforcement there?

  Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss: I think we ought to be able to treat that as contempt, and say, "you pay, otherwise you go inside"; but to treat it as a civil debt means they have got to go to the county court and they have got to enforce it. The procedures in the country court are slow on enforcement, and I think it will be lost in the mist.

  Mrs Justice Bracewell: We will be blamed, will we not?

  Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss: They will laugh at us for making a compensation order that cannot be enforced.

  Chairman: I just want to deal with the small part of the Bill that deals with the specific area of adoption.

  Q101  Baroness Hooper: You probably heard my earlier question, and Philip Moor's response. Given that it is considered that these provisions are non-controversial, do you agree with that? Is there anything in the adoption procedure?

  Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss: I have looked at this with considerable care, and I cannot see anything that we could possibly object to.

  Q102  Mr Chidgey: I am sure you will be aware that a few months ago there was a stop ordered by the Minister on adopting children from Thailand because of the concern of orphans being bought.

  Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss: I am aware of it.

  Q103  Mr Chidgey: It was quite understandable, but the situation arose, and would arise again if this process continues, of some adoptions going through the actual process, with the adoptive parents being in the country visiting the child and arranging all the necessary paperwork to bring the child back to England. What happened in that case is that the guillotine came down and a number of families were literally in the country in the middle of the process, and were left high and dry. That has caused considerable concern to the people involved. Do you feel that that process could be handled better? We have to look after the interests of the adoptive child, obviously, but we also have to look after the way the process is introduced. Should those cases not have been allowed to go through the process and completed, and not just stopped?

  Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss: We are dealing with an agonising situation, are we not? Here we have people who are unable to have children who are adopting outside the United Kingdom because there are not enough children here. But if the process in the other country is profoundly unsatisfactory and it is thought that it has to be stopped, to let the ones through is in a sense going to be bucking the system because what was wrong may presumably be wrong with those particular cases too. If you are going to have a guillotine, I suspect it has to come down.

  Q104  Mr Chidgey: I was going to suggest, Dame Elizabeth, that we could have reviewed those individual cases one by one, to ensure they did comply, rather than assume that every one was—

  Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss: If there can be a process! This was a Government decision, was it not?

  Q105  Mr Chidgey: Yes.

  Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss: It was not a judicial decision. If the children had come to this country, they could be looked after because we can perfectly well make them wards of court; we could put them with the family under certain conditions and so on, but if they have not left the country then one of the other problems is our immigration law, as to whether or not the immigration authorities will let them in.

  Q106  Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne: Do the courts feel that the burden of proof provided by the justice systems in the countries providing the children for inter-country adoption matches that that you would require here, and if it does not whether you feel there is any judicial process that could be brought into play by the British Government maybe in the countries of origin of the children, which would ameliorate that gap?

  Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss: We have to make the adoption order in this country. I do quite a lot of these foreign adoptions, as I suspect you do too.

  Mrs Justice Bracewell: Yes, I do.

  Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss: We do look at them with considerable care. The child does have a guardian, and we look to see whether anything is unacceptable. I would have thought once the child is in this country we can deal with whether or not the system in this country is all right, and whether the child is properly being presented to the court. What you do in the country of origin I do not know. There are some fairly dicey things going on in these other countries. If the child is here, and it is a perfectly respectable family going to adopt the child, the child will be all right. How you deal with it in the other country—I really do not see what we can do.

  Q107  Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne: Is there an ideological gap between the philosophy adopted throughout this debate on contact, for example, between a child and its natural parents, and in a country adoption child and contact with its natural parents?

  Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss: Apart from a famous Bosnian case that hit the headlines, where the child should never have been adopted and eventually the adoption was set aside, I have never come across a case from eastern Europe or the Far East where there has been any suggestion of a continuing contact with the natural parents.

  Mrs Justice Bracewell: Nobody has ever asked for it.

  Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss: Nobody has ever asked for it. The parent has handed the child over for whatever reason, or the parent was unavailable. I have never come across it.

  Mrs Justice Bracewell: It has never arisen in my experience.

  Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss: I do not think it would arise.

  Chairman: Virginia, I suspect you have some knowledge from your past role as a Secretary of State on this.

  Q108  Virginia Bottomley: I am very grateful. Is it not regrettable—a leading question—that none of our major children's charities, which have done so much to develop best practice on domestic adoption, will go near inter-country adoption? This may be because they had such bad experiences of what happened with the children going to Canada and Australia before the war that they shy away; but if only any of those highly regarded—Save the Children—charities became involved, they could help develop best practice. I do not know whether Dame Elizabeth can also comment on the dilemma—and I speak from experience here—that when greater legal requirements are imposed on the sending country, the danger is that those countries do not want to acknowledge that they are exporting their children, and the children get left relinquished in pretty unsatisfactory children's homes, rather than the governments face up to the reality. For the child concerned, turning a blind eye sometimes meant that the child went to a happier home sooner.

  Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss: This is why, if the child is in this country, as long as the family is suitable and the conditions of our adoption legislation are covered, I would not want to be too rigid on that. The first point is a lobbying point, if I may say so.

  Mrs Justice Bracewell: It is not a judicial point.

  Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss: Not a judicial point. I have nothing but sympathy, and since I am about to retire I thought that was a very interesting point with which I have great sympathy.

  Q109  Baroness Howarth of Breckland: It has become very clear from all our witnesses that there is a will for prevention rather than enforcement, and that the family assistance orders came central to that. I wondered whether our witnesses would be prepared to put in writing some of their thinking about how the family assistance orders could be improved, because that would assist the Committee hugely.

  Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss: I do not think there will be anything private about the fact that I have been—and I expect that Joyanne has also been saying very firmly to the Government departments that we must bring family assistance orders into this Bill. We have been saying this absolutely openly. We would be delighted, between us, to provide you with a short note with our views on it. It will be exactly what the two Government departments have heard!

  Q110  Chairman: Could you do a short paper on that? I also wonder about the contempt issue because you have made some interesting comments about how you deal with contempt in terms of breach. It may be that we have sufficient understanding but I was not quite sure how far you wanted to push the contempt issue with a parent who was not co-operating on the arrangements.

  Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss: We certainly would not want to lose the opportunity to send a parent who is seriously in contempt to prison. Interestingly, there is another country's view that if you put them inside for a short time, it has a magnificent effect. We have perhaps been a little pusillanimous in this country over the last 30 years in not wanting to put parents into prison, because the prisons are busy enough anyway, without our recalcitrant parents! Perhaps we should be tougher. I would rather go down the route of this Bill, which may I say I really do commend . I think it needs some improvements, but it certainly is a good Bill and we do need some further powers with which to encourage parents to behave themselves.

Chairman: Thank you. We have been longer than intended, but it has been very useful. I would certainly want you to write in if you feel there is anything not in the draft Bill that you think ought to go in, or if there are any other matters that have not been adequately covered this morning. Please come back to us, but particularly on the family assistance issue. Thank you very much indeed.