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Clause 25
Parenting orders in respect of criminal conduct and anti-social behaviour
Mr. Hawkins: I beg to move amendment No. 60, in
clause 25, page 22, line 17, leave out 'twelve months' and insert 'two years'.
The Chairman: With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
Amendment No. 61, in
clause 25, page 22, line 20, leave out 'three months' and insert 'twelve months'.
Amendment No. 62, in
Mr. Hawkins: Again, I can be brief because, as with amendments Nos. 58 and 59, amendments Nos. 61 and 62 are a repeat of counterpart amendments to an earlier clause about time limits. The judgment call we would make is two years not 12 months, and 12 months not three months. I am hoping that the Government will accept again an amendment like the one they accepted before lunch removing the words
''and not more than once in any week''.
I hope that the Minister knows what we are getting at. We want to take out those words and I am hoping that we will have a similar triumph. The Opposition must be allowed such small triumphs occasionally. If the Minister does accept that, I will beg to move amendment No. 62 when we come to the relevant point, as your colleague in the Chair allowed me to do this morning, Mr. Cran. I will wait to hear whether we are going to be equally lucky with this counterpart amendment.
Mrs. Annette L. Brooke (Mid-Dorset and North Poole): I rise to echo our support for amendment
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No. 62 for exactly the same reasons that we supported the similar amendment this morning.
Mr. Ainsworth: Amendments Nos. 60 and 61 are like amendments Nos. 49 and 50 that we discussed earlier. As I said earlier, we believe that 12 months is an adequate maximum for parents to be under an order and that 3 months is adequate for a parenting course. If they require additional parenting support, we would prefer to see parents opting for that on a voluntary basis. We believe that that would be more effective than parents being required to undergo orders and programmes for a much longer period.
Amendment No. 62 is intended to allow more flexibility in the delivery of parenting programmes by removing the one session per week restriction. We recognise that change in this area, and I am happy to accept that amendment, as I was happy to accept the earlier amendment in relation to the education situation.
Mr. Hawkins: We are delighted that the Government are going to accept the same sort of amendment that we tabled before, so I shall withdraw the lead amendment. Although we do not entirely agree with the Minister as he knows and we hope that he will keep the time limit under review, there is no point rehearsing the same argument we had this morning about those. Having withdrawn the lead amendment, I would like to press amendment No. 62. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Amendment made: No. 62, in
Clause 25, as amended, ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 26 ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 27
Parenting orders: appeals
Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
2.45 pm
Mr. Hawkins: Before we leave this part of the Bill altogether, I want to raise some points that might be relevant to the matters dealt with in appeals. I could have raised them under clause 26 or clause 23, but I have chosen to do so now. I hope that I am in order because these matters could come up under appeal.
I hope that the Government recognise that there is constant pressure on welfare reports to courts. That could come up under clause 26, as I said, but it could also come up under appeals. Everyone who has ever been involved in the justice system for criminal law or family law cases knows that there is a huge shortage of expert reporters to write reports to courts. I hope that the Government will take it from us that we will watch them to check that the necessary resources are in place.
I have been involved in many debates on such matters with the Minister's colleagues. I remember that when the hon. Member for Liverpool, Wavertree
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(Jane Kennedy) was in the Lord Chancellor's Department in the previous Parliament and I was shadowing her, we had many debates on the welfare service that the Government introduced, called the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service. Guardians ad litem were very much against that and saw various problems. People who had been experienced guardians ad litem were resigning left, right and centre because of the threat of CAFCASS. I should like some reassurance from the Minister, on the record, that the Government are aware of the difficulty of getting enough welfare report writers and that they will keep that under review.
The Government have put in clause 23 a reference to persons who are not individuals, by which they mean local authorities in relation to children in care. Whether we are discussing appeals or original hearings, there is always a concern that a lot of disruptive children will end up in care, for various reasons. We all understand that and have seen it in our constituency surgery work. I hope that the Government will bear in mind that, allied to the shortage of welfare report writers to courts, there are serious issues connected with children who end up in local authority care. It might, perhaps, be inappropriate to have a parenting order because there is not a parent with care of the child. I hope that the Government will not forget, at any stage, the issues that relate to children in care. We have all seen some of the horrendous family situations involving such children.
Mr. Ainsworth: The hon. Gentleman has made his points and put them on the record. I shall not pretend that I have the expertise to tell him to what degree there might be a deficiency of writers, as he alleges. His point is on the record and he will be able to refer back to it if the situation is as he claims.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 27 ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 28 ordered to stand part of the Bill.
New clause 2
Powers of Head Teachers
'A head teacher, supported by that head teacher's governing body, may take the decision to exclude a pupil on disciplinary grounds from that head teacher's school for a fixed period or permanently, and there shall be no appeal against the merits of that decision; an appeal may only be made as a matter of law, to be decided by a magistrates' court, if it is alleged, with reasonable grounds for that allegation that there has been an abuse of process in the decision-making on the exclusion. All legislative provisions relating to 'appeals panels' and their powers are hereby repealed.'.—[Mr. Hawkins.]
Brought up, and read the First time.
Mr. Hawkins: I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.
We now return, perhaps for the first time this afternoon, to an issue of huge substance, although I am not seeking to minimise the importance of the Government accepting an Opposition amendment. New clause 2 represents something that is at the core of my party's policies.
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I shall refer to one particular passage:
''Let's give heads more power over discipline in the classroom. We will abolish the costly and bureaucratic appeals panels that second-guess heads and governors''.
That is a policy commitment from the shadow Secretary of State for Education and Skills, my hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Mr. Green), speaking to our party conference last autumn.
Whenever we discuss the abolition of appeals panels, Government Members, and perhaps Liberal Democrat Members, say that the panels were created when the Conservative party was in government. When the appeals panel process was instituted in legislation, however, nobody in our party anticipated that the Government would mess about with the national lottery in the way in which they have, which they promised never to do when they were in opposition. Indeed, when they were in opposition, they tabled amendments to the national lottery legislation saying that no Government should ever do what they have done. They have messed about with the national lottery to allow the Community Fund to provide lottery funds to an individual whose raison d'ętre is working with parents to use appeals panels to overturn the decisions of heads.
The matter came to a head because the head of a Surrey school in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling), which is not far from my constituency, decided that because of death threats issued repeatedly over the phone to a particular teacher, who, if I remember correctly, happened to be the head of PE, some children should be excluded from the extremely good secondary school, which I know well. I also happen to know the chairman of governors, who is a former senior county councillor.
The governing body backed the head in that exclusion but the appeals panel overturned it. Why did the appeals panel overturn it? It overturned it because that individual, whose raison d'ętre is to work with parents who are disgruntled about exclusion decisions, went along to the hearing to try to persuade the people on the panel to overturn the view of the head and the governing body. Conservative Members consider that to be a travesty. It was a gross misuse of the national lottery.
The national lottery was supposed to be about good causes. It beggars belief that the people in the Community Fund can think it appropriate to give lottery money to that individual, whose contribution to society is to try to undermine heads and governing bodies. I wish that I had the people on the Community Fund in front of me, so that I could cross-examine them, which I used to do when I was a barrister in court, on exactly what they think they are playing at, not with taxpayers' money but with lottery money, which is the people's money. Such decisions contradict the idea that the Community Fund is about good causes.
I do not blame the Minister for the Community Fund's daft decisions but I blame the Government for
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messing about with the original idea of the national lottery. Under the rules of the national lottery as John Major designed it and the Conservative Government set it up, that sort of travesty could not have happened and money could not have been given to that individual. I cannot remember his name because my anger has driven it from my mind; I wish that I could remember it because I would put it on the record.
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