Paul
Rowen: That was very much the point I was seeking to make.
At the moment, the mother can deny the father the right to register his
name on the birth certificate. This procedure alters that and, by so
doing, the father automatically acquires parental responsibility.
Previously, the father would have had to go to the courts proactively,
but now he will acquire those rights and it will be for the mother to
go to the courts.
I am thinking
of a scenario involving a father in an estranged couple exercising his
responsibilities. There might well be disputes about registration of
the family name or religion. According to figures that I have been
given by Refuge, more than 30 per cent. of all violence starts or gets
worse during pregnancy. Whereas, at the moment, the onus is on the
father to go to the courts, with the change under schedule 6, it will
be on the mother. I am asking the Minister to have another look at the
workings of the measure. Without further safeguards, we will find that
vulnerable women will be forced either to accept what the father is
doing—a lot of women will be in that position—or to go
through the courts to obtain some protection.
Sometimes
there will have been a clean break and the mother will have moved away.
She may be trying not to have any contact with the father, but if he
exercises that right, he can use it as a lever to get at her. There are
real concerns there, and if the Minister agrees to look at how the
process might operate, I am sure that a lot of people will be
reassured. Perhaps we can make some changes at a later stage to give
these women the protection that they
deserve.
Kitty
Ussher: That is a useful point. It might be worth bearing
in mind that, if the two people are married, even if they are
separated, the father automatically acquires parental responsibility,
so the mother would
have to go through the courts to protect herself. We are saying that if
a man proactively says, “I am the father,” he would be in
the same position as if the couple were
married.
I am not
going to look at this again because I think we have the balance right
and that existing legal protections through the courts are sufficient
to address the problems. Prove me wrong, but I think that putting the
man on the register is not the act that is going to make him a
dangerous person. In a sense, the dangers are already known and the
procedures for protecting a family are already known and can be
commenced at an early stage. If an unmarried father is unfit to
exercise parental responsibility, it is for the courts to restrict or
remove that responsibility. The difference is whether the state is
proactively doing something that means that violence is more likely,
which is where we should be drawing the
line.
Meg
Munn: The Minister has effectively just outlined the point
I have been making. The issues of violence are there anyway, so the
processes for dealing with violent people should be the ones that
operate, rather than allowing holes in the rights of children to have
their parents registered.
Kitty
Ussher: The difference is whether the act of the state
proactively creates a violent situation, or whether the violence is
already there because there is knowledge of the birth. We are trying to
create an exemption for a situation in which the father does not know
about the birth, but the act of telling him about it would create
violence. That is different from a violent parent seeking to get
parental responsibility and trying to use the birth certificate as one
way to achieve that, when it is right for the courts to restrict such a
thing. We have probably debated this sufficiently, but I should be
happy to take further interventions if another Member would like to
keep
going. Through
amendment 105, the hon. Member for Rochdale wants to expand the family
unit that the mother may fear could be harmed beyond the mother and
child to any other children. We reject the amendment because,
practically, it is difficult to envisage a situation in which other
children would be at threat, but the child in question and/or the
mother would not. We feel that the exemptions as drafted are sufficient
to take all these situations into
consideration.
Paul
Rowen: I would like to outline to the Minister a couple of
scenarios relevant to amendment 105 that have been given to me by
Gingerbread. The first is where a woman moves to a different area,
unknown to the man, following allegations of sexual abuse by him
against a teenage daughter. I know that there are a very small number
of such cases, but there is a fear that the man could use the process
of registration to find out where the family had moved to. The second
scenario
is—
The
Chairman: Order. Interventions should be short, not second
speeches under the guise of an
intervention.
Kitty
Ussher: Gingerbread obviously has a list of examples, so
why do I not commit to having a conversation with the organisation
after the conclusion of the Committee?
Mr.
Harper: I would like to return to the subject we are
arguing about—this is where the Minister fundamentally
misunderstands my proposal. The provision is about the duty of the
mother to notify the registry office. She is still perfectly able to
notify the registrar of unverifiable information—she is allowed
to tell the registrar who the father is, even is she has no clue where
he is on planet Earth. We are simply talking about whether she has a
duty to tell the registrar. She would be perfectly able to give the
registrar lots of information that the registrar could not verify, but
might be able to verify in the future. This is simply about whether she
has the duty to tell the registrar. It goes down to how important we
think it is that children know who their birth parents
are. Birth
registrations should be about registering births. The hon. Member for
Sheffield, Heeley is quite right that protecting children and mothers
from violence can be achieved through the courts and a whole bunch of
other forms of protection. As the Minister said, it should not be the
function of the birth registration system to start arguing about
whether there are child protection or domestic violence
issues—it is simply about who the parents of a particular child
are. If the mother has a duty to notify the registrar of information
about the father so that information can be recorded and, hopefully,
verified at some point in the future, the number of exemptions that
relieve the mother of that duty should be very small, or there should
be none at all. The mother should have to provide the
information—the only exemption that makes any sense at all is
where she does not know who the father is, because clearly she would
not be able to communicate any information. I thus do not follow the
logic of the Minister’s arguments about amendment
36. On
amendment 37, we have had a good debate about threats of domestic
violence—they are clearly very important and, fortunately, real
in only a relatively small number of cases. The right way to deal with
them is to look at other processes, whether that is the criminal
justice system or the system of injunctions. When discussing violence,
the Minister did not address how we should deal with that within the
child maintenance system. The issues that she talked about are related
to whether the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission is told who
the father is, and that then intervenes, which may then lead to a whole
bunch of other issues. Until relatively recently, a mother was
compelled to involve the Child Support Agency, or its successor, if she
was on benefits, whether she wanted to or not. That might have led to
all these complicated issues. The Minister would have been better to
keep these provisions short, sweet and crisp, and focused on the
notification of birth registrations, without over-complicating things.
However, given that we have had a good debate, I will not press my
amendments to a Division, although we may well return to the issue on
Report. I
want to close by commenting briefly on the amendments tabled by the
hon. Member for Rochdale. I take his point about circumstances in which
the father already had parental responsibility, but his amendments are
concerned with situations in which the mother might
“fear for her
safety...if the father were to acquire
responsibility” by
virtue of the relevant provisions of the Children Act 1989.
The father in that situation does not have responsibility from that
source already; it is something that he must go to court to get. There
is already a procedure to cover such
circumstances.
Paul
Rowen: As the Minister said earlier, a change is being
made to the law, and once the registration takes place the father will
not have to go to court to get parental responsibility. That is the
issue that I am concerned
about.
Mr.
Harper: No, the problem is the way in which the hon.
Gentleman has drafted his amendments, which specify only certain
circumstances in which the father might acquire responsibility by
virtue of the 1989 Act. If the father already had parental
responsibility, the situation would not be a valid reason for the
mother not to make the declaration in the first place. The hon.
Gentleman’s intentions might be appropriate, and the Minister
might have confirmed that his concerns are valid, but the amendments
are not well drafted and do not achieve the objective he intends them
to. They are not very sound. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the
amendment.
Amendment,
by leave,
withdrawn.
Mr.
Harper: I beg to move amendment 38, in
schedule 6, page 94, line 19, leave
out subsection
(3). The
amendment relates to the provisions on scientific tests to determine
paternity, which make it clear that those tests would happen with the
consent of both parties. My amendment would omit the measure that
specifies that the regulations may not require people to participate in
the tests and makes it clear that they are voluntary. My reason for
probing the Minister on this is two-fold. First, if the tests are
purely voluntary, I am not quite sure what proposed new section 2E of
the Births and Deaths Registration Act 1953 Act adds to anything. It
seems to me that without the provision it would be perfectly possible,
when there was doubt about paternity, for the mother and father to get
a test and establish that the father was indeed the father of the
child. The mother could notify the registrar and the father could
confirm the information. It would seem that that could all be done
perfectly well without the provision, so if the Minister can explain
why it is in the Bill, that would be
helpful. Secondly,
I want to probe a little about the reason for not including the
possibility of compulsion. I am not sure that I am in favour of it, but
I want to find out why the Government, having drafted the new
provisions, which are quite long and complicated, felt that compulsion
was not required. That brings me back to the question of the importance
for the child of knowing who its parents are. Why does the Minister not
think it appropriate that, in a situation in which the mother says one
man is the father and he says he is not, it should be possible to order
a test to clear the matter up? There are circumstances when that
happens, such as court cases involving assets, money, wills and
legacies. The courts can order tests to determine paternity, so it
seems that it would be perfectly possible to do so in the matter of
registering a birth so that the child could know who its parents were.
That principle is accepted in a range of other contexts, and I wondered
if the Minister could outline why the Government did not think it
appropriate for the purposes of birth
registration.
12
noon
Kitty
Ussher: I am happy to provide the explanation that the
hon. Gentleman wants. The principle is that when there is a dispute, it
is dealt with through the
courts, and that when we can make things easier in a co-operative
environment, we can do so through the registry office. We do not want
to make adversarial a process that is designed to assist parents and
facilitate birth registration. We will provide parents with information
about tests and we can explain the advantages of co-operating but, on
reflection, we do not think it right for the registry office to insist
on tests if parents or putative parents have a bitter dispute about
parentage. As the hon. Gentleman rightly says, there are many contexts
in which that might
happen. If
the situation is adversarial, there are court provisions to resolve
it—that is the best way to do that. When the situation is not
adversarial, it is right that the registry office is able to offer
advice and facilitate the taking of a paternity test to make it easier
for the parents to resolve the matter. In a voluntary situation, the
measure is a simplification that makes it easier for parents to resolve
the issue. If the situation is adversarial, we take it out of the
registry office and leave it where such situations are always resolved:
in the
courts.
Mr.
Harper: I am grateful to the Minister for that
explanation. It is still not entirely clear if the proposed new
subsection enables the registry to do anything that it could not do
already. There seems to be nothing preventing the publication of
literature to explain how paternity tests work and how one might go
about getting one. The Minister does not seem to have set out what this
chunk of the Bill achieves or what it changes about the registration
process. It might just be me, but I do not think that she made that
clear—perhaps she will have another
go.
Kitty
Ussher: I am happy to have another go. This is simply
about having a process that is recognised by the registry office, which
is why it needs to be in legislation. At the moment, the registry
office has to go through a court for the registrar to be able to accept
paternity. This measure enables a civil process that would make it far
easier to resolve the matter in a non-adversarial situation. We need to
have that in law so that the registrar can accept the results without
having to go to a court. It is a simplification measure, and the hon.
Gentleman’s party has always said that it is in favour of
simplification.
Mr.
Harper: The situation is still not clear. If the mother
and the father agree, having had the test, that they are the mother and
the father—this is a voluntary situation—I am not sure
what the registrar has to accept. It is not the result of the test,
because if the result was disputed, there would be an adversarial court
process, as the Minister said. If the situation is amicable, the test
is purely factual—it says who the father is—and parentage
is agreed, so both parents can say that to the registrar and the
process can continue. The measure does not add much except more words
to the Bill; it does not give the registrar any particular
powers.
Kitty
Ussher: Okay, I will give the hon. Gentleman one example,
although I do not want to get into specifics: a man says, “That
child is mine” but mum says, “Actually, I’ve had a
few partners and am not quite sure”. Do we have to go to court
to sort that out, or can the registrar recognise
parentage?
Mr.
Harper: This is still not clear. That case does not seem
to bring us further forward, but I will not detain the Committee. In
that case, once the mother and father were clear about the result of
the test, they could say that to the registrar. However, we have talked
considerably about the issue, and I beg to ask leave to withdraw the
amendment. Amendment,
by leave,
withdrawn. Amendment
made: 114, in schedule 6, page 98, line 40, leave out
from ‘child’ to end of line 41 and
insert— ‘( ) where the
alleged father acknowledges that he is the father of the child, require
the alleged father to give prescribed information to the registrar,
and ( ) where the alleged
father gives that information to the
registrar,’.—(Kitty
Ussher.) This amendment relates to
the process for re-registering a birth to include the father’s
details. Where a man acknowledges to the registrar that he is the
child’s father, it ensures that he can be required to provide
the registrar with the information needed to re-register the
birth. Schedule
6, as amended, agreed
to.
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