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House adjourned at five minutes past eight o'clock.
The first four Statements should have been printed on Tuesday 7 June.
Written Statements
Wednesday 8 June 2005
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International Development Committee
The Lord President of the Council (Baroness Amos): My right honourable friend the Secretary of State for International Development (Mr Hilary Benn) has made the following Written Ministerial Statement.
Today I am laying a Command Paper before Parliament detailing the Government's response to the report by the International Development Committee entitled Darfur, Sudan: The-responsibility to protect.
Department for International Development: Annual Report
Baroness Amos: My right honourable friend the Secretary of State for International Development (Mr Hilary Benn) has made the following Written Ministerial Statement.
I am today laying before Parliament the Department for International Development's departmental report 2005.
NHS: Home Oxygen Service
The Minister of State, Department of Health (Lord Warner): My right honourable friend the Minister of State (Jane Kennedy) has made the following Written Ministerial Statement today.
Following extensive discussion and consultation with healthcare professionals, patients and their representatives, and the oxygen service industry, I am announcing today that four companies have won contracts, following competitive tender, to provide the home oxygen service in 10 National Health Service home oxygen service regions in England. The four companies are Air Products, the British Oxygen Company, Allied Oxycare/Medigas and Linde. This is a five-year contract, with an option to renew for a further two years. The overall annual cost of the new service is some £49 million.
NHS patients will have access to an improved service, including for the first time portable or ambulatory oxygen systems.
There are other improvements offering better choice and access to better services through a range of technically advanced oxygen equipment that will meet the needs of individual patients, with expert advice and support on its use on a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week basis. The new service will start later this year.
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Student Finance
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education and Skills (Lord Adonis): My honourable friend the Minister of State for Lifelong Learning, Further and Higher Education (Bill Rammell) has made the following Written Ministerial Statement.
I am announcing today the terms of reference for a review of higher education student finance delivery, which will be conducted by my department: to review the arrangements for the delivery of government financial support to higher education students, and its collection from borrowers, in England and recommend options for improvement. The review should be completed by November 2005.
In making recommendations, the review shall have regard to the Government's principles for improving public service delivery, including:
a focus on the needs of customers, including the provision of advice and the particular needs of under-represented student groups;
an efficient and effective delivery process with appropriate use of technology to improve customer service;
clear objectives and challenging performance measures, benchmarked against comparable services;
the need for a strategic relationship between the department and any delivery organisations, with clearly allocated responsibility and accountability and effective management of delivery risks; and
that the service demonstrates value for money and is sufficiently flexible to deal with possible future changes in the higher education environment.
The review will also consider the future role of the Student Loans Company in improved delivery arrangements and its status and mission.
Children (Contact) and Adoption Bill
Lord Adonis: My honourable friend the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Children and Families has made the following Written Ministerial Statement.
Following our receipt of the report of the Joint Committee on the draft Children (Contact) and Adoption Bill, I am pleased to say that the Government's response to that report is today being presented to Parliament.
The Bill, which we hope will be introduced in the current parliamentary session, would take forward the commitment we made in the Green Paper Parental Separation: Children's Needs and Parents' Responsibilities to provide the courts with more flexible powers to facilitate contact and enforce contact orders.
At present, contact orders can be enforced only through contempt of court proceedings leading to fine or imprisonment. Courts have quite rightly been reluctant to use these measures because of the
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potential negative impact on the children involved. That is why they need additional, more flexible and realistic powers, of the sort that this Bill will provide. It will allow the courts to:
direct parties in a contact case to undertake a "contact activity" such as attending information sessions, meetings with a counsellor, parenting programmes/classes, or other activities designed to deal with contact disputes; and
attach conditions to contact orders which may require a party to undertake a contact activity.
Where a contact order has been breached, courts will be able to:
impose community-based "enforcement orders"; or
award financial compensation from one party to another (for example, where the cost of a holiday has been lost).
In addition, the Bill provides a statutory framework for the imposition of restrictions on intercountry adoptions from particular countries where there are concerns about adoption processes there.
We are very grateful to the committee for the detailed consideration it gave to this Bill, and were pleased that much of the report has chimed so closely with our own thinking and approach in developing the Bill. It was particularly helpful that the committee considered some issues where we thought that greater examination would be important, and we were pleased that the committee agreed with us that the use of electronic tagging would be disproportionate. We will therefore remove that provision, which appeared in square brackets in the draft Bill, from the Bill as introduced.
Most importantly, it is gratifying that the committee has not recommended any change in the fundamentals of the Bill on either contact or intercountry adoption, and agrees with our firm belief that the welfare of children must remain the paramount consideration of the courts when determining any question in relation to their upbringing.
Jury Service: Members of Parliament
The Chairman of Committees (Lord Brabazon of Tara): Since the coming into force of the Criminal Justice Act 2003, Members of the House have no longer been exempt from jury service as of right. On 20 October 2004, I wrote to the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, asking him to consider the potential difficulties which might be faced by Members who undertook jury service. The Lord Chief Justice replied on 5 April in the following terms:
"Following your letter of 20 October 2004 I am writing to notify you that following on from my meeting last year with Sir George Young as Chairman of the Committee on Standards and Privileges I did give some thought as to the potential difficulties faced by Members of Parliament (both MPs and Peers) who
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may find themselves balancing a duty to undertake jury service with their important public service duties as Members of Parliament.
Having given some thought to the problems I concluded that similar difficulties may apply equally to a great number of categories of people with essential public service commitments who were previously ineligible or exempt as of right from jury service.
Judges do have discretion to deal with such applications sympathetically but would always have to balance the needs of the juror with the interests of justice in each case. The enclosed Practice Direction, which I handed down on 22 March 2005, is designed to remind judges of that discretion not just in relation to applications from MPs and Peers but in relation to applications from any worker with critical public service commitments. I trust that it will provide the reassurance you were seeking."
The full text of the correspondence between the Lord Chief Justice and myself, together with the Practice Direction referred to, have been placed in the Library of the House.
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