18 Nov 2017

Petition: Introduce Automatic Penalties When A Contact Order Is Broken Repeatedly

By Jordan Holbrook: There is a petition currently live and operational on the Parliament Petitions website (UK – only), demanding the introduction of automatic penalties when a contact order is broken repeatedly.
Quoting the petition: 
There are many cases documented where one parent repeatedly breaks the Contact Order without penalty and the injured party (normally the father) has to keep going back to Court, at their expense, to try and see their child. This often results in fathers losing contact with their child.
Introducing more stringent automatic penalties when a parent repeatedly breaks a contact order without good reason will help keep parents in their children’s lives. We would also like a named body that can investigate when a contact order is breached. In many European countries, the police intervene immediately to ensure the rights of the child to see their non-resident parent are protected. The existing system is too slow and unwieldy and the penalties are unenforceable. 
MoJ statistics show that in 2011, there were 2,000 orders for enforcement of which only 2% were successful. In 2016, there were 6,000 of which only 1% were successful.
The deadline for the petition is 17 April 2018. At 10,000 signatures the government will respond, at 100,000 the petition will be considered for debate.
As 165,000 children are subject to private law orders every year here in the UK, hitting 100,000 signatures should not be too difficult, so long as the petition is advertised correctly. 
The petition can be found by clicking anywhere on this sentence.




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