I should like to thank Mr. Speaker for agreeing to the subject of this Adjournment debate.

I should start by declaring that in 2006 I brought together a number of campaign groups in the justice for families campaign, which I chair. I am also taking the unusual step of releasing a campaign song, the proceeds of which will be used to prevent miscarriages of justice.

There is something rather dreadful happening in England today, but not in Scotland. In England, we have targets for adoption and rewards for moving children from one family to another, but not in Scotland, where the priority is to keep families together. In England, two thirds of children leaving care are adopted, but not in Scotland, where two thirds of children under five go home to their birth parents. The drive to increase the number of adoptions and the recycling rewards for local authorities have caused masses of miscarriages of justice. Yvonne Coulter, Chris Smith, PC and S and the Websters were all cases in which children were stolen by the state from their birth parents, only for it to be found later that it was a mistake. A mistake, yes, but not a mistake that can be put right.

I know of a case in which a baby was put into care on a fast track to adoption because his mother might get post-natal depression. Is that right? I do not think so. How did it help the local authority? It helped it hit its recycling target. In the deep, dark corners of the British legal system, hidden away by threats of imprisonment for those who speak out about injustice, we have allowed bad practice to fester. No action can be taken by a Member of Parliament to prevent solicitors from undermining their own clients because they want to keep the money coming in from the local council. No action can be taken by an MP to stop social workers who lie to the courts because they want to win a case and hit their adoption targets, or to stop doctors who provide rubbishy, unproven and unchallenged medical evidence that destroys families, but fills their bank accounts.

The reason for that is the secrecy of the proceedings under the Access to Justice Act 1999. There are a number of very good people working in the system to protect children from maltreatment, but they are undermined by the lack of action to deal with bad behaviour by practitioners. That has to come to an end. We need to consider the issues honestly and openly while we have an opportunity to amend the Children and Young Persons Bill. I have two new clauses that could assist in improving accountability without undermining children.

As in all aspects of the public or private sector, there is a range of people of different competences. There are some very good people working as social workers, lawyers, experts or judges, but there are also those who are incompetent or corrupt. The difference in public family law is that the secrecy of the system prevents accountability. In theory, there are checks and balances that prevent the abuse of state power, but practitioners often collude to prevent those checks and balances from coming into operation.

A good current example is a case covered in the following verse in the song I referred to earlier:

“The boys they say that they won’t talk to their mom

The judge says foster care is what must be done

Dad says its wrong by writing a book

He’s put in jail ‘cos somebody looked.”

It is absolutely absurd to place two children aged 13 and 15 in foster care because they will not talk to their mother, who is estranged from their father. The father would like to appeal, but the lawyers, including his own solicitor, are working against him. To appeal, he needs a judgment, but he still has not been given it. On Monday, I spoke to the 15-year-old, who is in fact 16 today, and he said, “I think children’s social services are a complete disaster. My brother is mortified because he wants to go back to his dad. I think the way things are happening is pathetic. My father has never hurt either of us.”

Let us understand the reality of this. Tens of thousands of pounds are being spent to keep in care two children who have never been hurt by their father. In effect, they are being imprisoned in care for no good reason. However, outside Parliament, we are not allowed to scrutinise the reasoning. The problem is that the rule of law is systematically undermined in the family division.

There is supposed to be a tape recording of the hearing. However, as yet, we have not managed to obtain a copy of such tapes. Transcripts are refused to parties on the basis of exaggerated costs. In the Harkness case, the transcript did not correlate with the parents’ memory of the case. In Pauline Goodwin’s case, the tape of her hearing in the Court of Appeal seems to have gone astray. If somebody manages to get a case to the Court of Appeal, the court has been known to say that it is out of time even though somebody has been struggling for years for a judgment.

One of the more worrying aspects about the Court of Appeal is that substantive cases are heard at the permission stage. If the court decides to refuse the appeal, it makes an order under section 54(4) of the Access to Justice Act 1999, preventing the case from going to the House of Lords. The Act prevents family law decisions from being considered by the House of Lords to ensure that we have a unified body of law. We have to ensure that parties are provided with tapes of their hearings immediately afterwards so that they can obtain timely copies of the judgments. We also need to change section 54(4) of the 1999 Act so that there is proper consideration of issues by the UK supreme court, the House of Lords.

It is worth considering a few cases in some detail to see how things go wrong. Fran Lyon’s case never encountered the courts. She was a pregnant mother who became one of my constituents for a while before she emigrated. She was told that she was such a great risk to her baby that the child had to be removed within 15 minutes of birth and she could never breast-feed. However, her case was reviewed in Sweden. All the information cooked up by children’s services and doctors in Northumberland was examined and it was decided to discharge her from hospital. Fran suffers from angiodaema so she has a tracheotomy. The doctors in the north-east said she had Munchhausen syndrome by proxy and caused her angiodaema herself. The doctors in Sweden said that she should sue the doctors in the north-east for malpractice because her angiodaema was not self-induced—it even occurred when she was unconscious. Yesterday, I received the official English translation of the Swedish social work report, which concluded:

“Our assessment is that there is no need for support or any other programme with regard to Fran’s capacity as a parent.”

In England, the plan was to take the baby 15 minutes after birth, which would have also involved the usual twin-tracking adoption plan. In Northumberland, there was systematic and corrupt abuse of process. Sadly, that is all too common in the system.

In Norfolk, in the Webster case, the health visitor was pressurised to change her opinion about the family. When combined with unreliable and wrong medical evidence, that caused three of the children to be adopted. Another case in Norfolk involved three social workers in a 12-person case conference deciding to override the nine-three vote that a child was not at risk. Instead, they put the child on the child protection register. All 12 experts got together. Nine voted that there was no problem, but three voted that there was and later decided to ignore the nine. That is abuse of process. It is not democratic and it is not a proper mechanism. I am aware of other sub judice cases in Norfolk, on which of course I cannot comment. They all involve abuse of process and perversion of the course of justice.

Although the targets and financial rewards for adoptions have now rightly been scrapped, their presence has massively damaged an already creaking system. While they were in place, in law the opinion of the local authority was subject to a financial conflict of interest, which made a substantial number of judgments unlawful. The lawyers like to blame the social workers. However, the real problem lies in the court system and the law.

The test for almost any decision making is whether there is a “risk of significant harm”—the standard section 31 definition in the Children Act 1989. The vagueness of that description allows all sorts of nonsense to be accepted. At the same time many parents’ solicitors are subjected to a conflict of interest because they are also paid by the local authority or guardian. It is sadly not rare for a parent’s solicitor to fail to contest an application for a care order, or indeed to persuade parents, against their will, to accept that the section 31 threshold has been met. At that point the parents are at the mercy of the state’s family steamroller.

In the meantime, the children are almost invariably ignored. I referred to the case of children who did not want to be in care; they are being ignored by their guardian. Someone is appointed whose job title is “representing the interests of the children”—the guardian ad litem. Most of those guardians work for CAFCASS—the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service. CAFCASS East Midlands was recently inspected by Ofsted, who found the service “inadequate”; in other words, not up to the job.

Historically, the judges have had a tendency merely to agree with the proposals of the local authority, unless the guardian takes a different view; we therefore have a system that depends on a financially biased local authority and a frequently inadequate guardian—not a recipe for good decision making. That meant that parents did not have a prayer. Things have improved more recently, and that should soon become evident from the statistics on cases. There are still problems following the new public law outline, but most of the cases in which there are problems are still sub judice, so I shall not refer to them.

What are the Government doing? Recently, the case of Simeon Kellman came before the criminal courts. He used a council’s child database to find victims to abuse. The Government are to introduce a national database, so that the Kellmans of this world can find their victims nationally—very clever. We know that being in care is not good for children, so why are children put into care for rubbishy reasons?

Another problem is that we really do not know what happens to children who go through the system. One local authority lost 61 children in one year; it has no idea where they have gone. There is an annual return called the SSDA903 that is sent to the Department for Children, Schools and Families. That return does not track the point at which children come out of care, unless they are adopted or go into special guardianship. It does not track most outcomes; it gives them as “other”. When one asks people to go through the files, as we did in the case of the authority where 61 children were lost, they say that they can find some of the children, but one local authority—admittedly a rather large one—does not know where 61 kids went. In Scotland, authorities do look at where children end up. That is why it is easier there to find out what is happening to the children.

We have been running a massive social experiment in forced adoption—adoption against the will of not just the parents, but those children old enough to understand what is happening. A study conducted by Ofsted looked at children’s views of the adoption process. At least a third said that they did not want to be adopted; they wanted to be left where they were. Inevitably, a large number of forced adoptions break down, but there is little research on the subject. I recently had discussions with the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children about the process of forced adoption and how it affects children in the long term. Figures indicate that the failure rate of forced adoptions is, at a minimum, a quarter to a third. That is the sort of information on which we should get proper research, but that research is not being done.

Another appalling aspect of the system is the way in which children are damaged by care proceedings, even if the proceedings end with the children going home. Let us take a situation where a baby is taken away at birth and put into foster care—that is not good for the baby, to start with. After about a year’s legal wrangling, when people have made lots of money from representing various parties, the child goes home because it is found that there was no evidence of any risk in the first instance. Think about the Fran Lyon case; what would have happened to her if she had stayed in England? She would have lost her baby at birth and there would have been massive wrangling. In fact, her first lawyer told her that she should just give up because she would never win, so she emigrated. It damages children to go through that process. The fact that the system tends not to let go means that children get damaged by the process.

A case in Oldham—the judgment was anonymous, which is very good—caused a mother to have an abortion to avoid care proceedings. In that case, a child was taken away at an early stage because of allegations that the child had been harmed by the parents. After massive legal and medical wrangling, and an attempt to get a second opinion—the opinion was initially refused by the court of first instance and by the court of appeal, but then accepted by the court of appeal—the parents were proved innocent. They were not just not guilty; it was proved that it was not a shaken-baby-syndrome-type case, for those who study these things. There was no justification for the intervention whatever, but the child and the parents suffered, and the mother had an abortion to prevent the same thing from happening to another child.

We really need to carry out proper, rational risk analysis. The intervention of the state is almost invariably damaging. We need to minimise the damage caused by intervening while any investigation is going on. Most foster carers are good people, but we have to stop covering up situations where foster carers abuse the children in their care. The Care Leavers Association wants a public inquiry on the issue, and we should accede to its demand. We also need to revisit the idea of supporting families, rather than using the hammer.

The system is far more badly broken than I expected it to be when I started studying it. The way in which the child protection system operates has wide ramifications for society. The evidence is clear in the number of prisoners who have been in care. It is also clear that the removal of children from mothers who are victims of domestic violence is causing them not to report that violence. The procedures followed after multi-agency risk assessment conferences, which are carried out in response to 392 forms, are causing concern among mothers who are victims. People suffer in silence rather than having to handle the consequences of asking for help.

We cannot continue leaving the details to the practitioners. Proper scrutiny and accountability are essential. The system is supposed to have as a priority keeping families together. Why, then, are they split up in England, but kept together in Scotland? The Prime Minister said that the difference came from a difference in social work practice. Clearly, the system does not do what it says on the box. It does not protect children properly or support keeping families together properly. The evidence is there, north of the border.

We have systematically excluded grandparents from the decision-making process. That is ludicrous, as they are the normal source of back-up child care. Early-day motion 1199, which I tabled, focuses on the issue, following suggestions from the GrandParents Association and various other lobby groups. I am pleased to say that a motion has been tabled at the Council of Europe leading towards an investigation into family law in England and Wales. It would be good if we could have such an investigation in this country and not rely on the Council of Europe to sort out our problems.

Yesterday, we heard of the number of families destroyed by the system, often for no reason other than financial reward. Today we must start debating the issues, and tomorrow we need to reform public family law and stop such things ever happening again.

Below is the heartless response of a Minister in the then Government, surprisingly, a woman, defending UK CPS.

Bridget Prentice Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Ministry of Justice 7:40 pm, 23rd April 2008