We welcome the substantial revisions to the wording of the clause, in particular the use of “involvement” rather than “shared parenting”, which we believe could help to minimise the harm the clause might cause, but we are still concerned about how the provision will work in practice. I hope the Committee will bear with me as I intend to take a little time to outline why.

As with much of the Bill, we do not disagree with the Government’s stated intention. We believe it is critical to most children that they have a good relationship with their mum and their dad. We know that it is usually also very important to both parents. When it is safe and consistent with the child’s welfare, we believe that that should be supported through law, policy and practice as fully as possible. However, we also believe that the change to legislation is misguided, in part because it is designed to tackle the wrong problem. As the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and the Children’s Legal Centre have made clear, in the past 20 years, a succession of research has demonstrated that there is no systemic bias in the court system.

The most recent research—by the universities of Oxford and Sussex—found that the planned change “is not evidence based”. They interviewed 398 young people whose parents had separated in their childhood and found that it was rare for a young person to say that the parent they lived with had tried to undermine their relationship with the other parent. There was no evidence that children resist contact primarily because their resident parent pressures them to do so. They felt very strongly that a clear demonstration of commitment from the parent they did not live with was much more important than the amount and type of contact they had with them.

The message is that promoting ongoing contact is not about legislation; it is about quality of relationships, especially the quality of those relationships before parents separated. In the vast majority of cases that come to court, the courts agree contact. In 2010, only 300 out of 95,460 applications for child contact were refused. That is just 0.3% of all the cases that came to the courts. Of those, as the NSPCC points out, most were related to cases where there were serious child welfare concerns. Non-resident fathers are just as likely as resident mothers to get the court orders they seek. Roughly equal numbers of mothers and fathers report that the courts are biased against them.

As a result, the NSPCC says it is concerned that the proposed changes might be based on perceived rather than actual bias and, as such, could inadvertently raise barriers to the best contact arrangements for children. The Committee ought to take that seriously because the Minister’s comments seem to support it. In evidence to the Select Committee on Justice, he said:

“The intention, as I say, is to deal with the sense that there is an in-built bias towards one parent or another within the current system, to get more confidence into that system with those who come into contact with it”.

Surely a law that works in practice and in principle should not be changed in response to a perceived bias that does not, as it turns out, have a basis in fact. Unless the law is broken, I do not understand why the Government would seek to fix it. I have not heard Ministers say that the current law is broken and I do not believe it is. A wide coalition of organisations, from Action for Children to Resolution, says unequivocally that the Children Act 1989 already supports the encouragement of parental involvement where it is safe and in the child’s best interests. Furthermore, countries such as Australia, where there is a statutory presumption of contact, have just as many children who lose contact as England and Wales. The real problem and injustice for parents come when contact decisions are not enforced.

Tackling that is difficult. Ministers have floated and tried a number of ways, including penalties for non-compliance such as revoking driving licences or passports. It seems to me that none of those means much to parents who strongly believe, whether it is the case or not, that they are acting in their children’s best interests in defying the court.

I can see why, as a result of that situation, a Government would, out of frustration, resort to trying to deal with it through changes to the law. However, in my view, and in the view of many organisations, the measure could have serious, unintended negative consequences for children, which I shall set out for the Committee.