KEY MEASURES

• Providing additional powers to the courts to facilitate contact or enforce contact orders, including: power to direct parties to attend information sessions, meetings with a counsellor, parenting programmes/classes, etc.
• When a contact order is breached, provide power for courts to impose community-based enforcement orders for unpaid work or curfew, or award financial compensation from one party to another.
• Reforming Family Assistance Orders to extend their flexibility and make them more effective.
• Measures relating to intercountry adoption, including:
    -  Providing a statutory framework for the suspension of inter-country adoptions from specified countries where there are public policy concerns about the process in that country, such as concerns about child trafficking.

TERRITORIAL EXTENT

The provisions relating to contact with children extend to England and Wales only.  There are currently discussions taking place about the extent of the inter-country adoption provisions between officials in England and the devolved administrations.

COMMENTS

If you have any comments on the proposals you can email them to:

children.bill@dfes.gsi.gov.uk

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

• The Bill was published in draft in the last session. The pre-legislative scrutiny committee's report can be found at http://www.parliament.uk/parliamentary_committees/jcdccab.cfm
• The contact provisions in the Bill are intended to implement a number of the recommendations originally made by the Children Act Sub-Committee of the Lord Chancellor's advisory board on family law in their report Making Contact Work.
• We announced proposals to put these recommendations into effect, and provide new powers to the courts, in the Green Paper Parental Separation: Children's Needs and Parents' Responsibilities, which was published in July 2004, and built on by the Next Steps document responding to the consultation which was published in January 2005.  Both documents are available at www.dfes.gov.uk/childrensneeds.