3rd July 1998
The Telegraph
MEN who father children outside marriage are to be given the same parental rights as married fathers, the Government announced yesterday.
The change will mean that unmarried fathers who sign the birth register with the baby's mother will automatically be given the same parental responsibility. About 180,000 fathers a year will benefit from the move, which is designed to encourage parents, whether married or not, to recognise their responsibilities to their children.
The reform also reflects changes in a society in which more than a third of children are born to unmarried couples. Under the present law, married parents have equal rights to take decisions about the upbringing of their children. But where they are unmarried, the mother has the sole rights, even if the father's name is on the birth certificate.
Unmarried fathers can acquire parental responsibility rights by concluding an agreement with the mother which must be properly witnessed and registered with the court. Where the parents are unable to reach such an agreement, the father can apply to the court for a parental responsibility order and the majority of these applications are successful. But only between 5,000 to 7,000 such agreements are registered each year, and only 5,500 parental responsibility orders were made by the courts in 1996.
In the same year, more than 181,600 unmarried fathers jointly registered their babies' births with the mother. This was in 78 per cent of the 233,663 births outside wedlock that year and in three out of four cases, the parents were living together. An unmarried father who has separated from the child's mother does not need parental responsibility rights under the 1989 Children Act to apply to the courts for an order about where the child should live or an order for contact and access.
But without parental responsibility, the unmarried father has no power to object if the mother puts the child up for adoption and he has no right to consent to medical treatment for the child if the mother is unavailable. Where a residence order is in force, the child's surname cannot be changed and the child cannot be taken abroad for more than a limited period without either the consent of everyone with parental responsibility or the leave of the court.
Difficulties have also arisen where unmarried fathers without parental responsibility have applied for an abducted child to be returned to the United Kingdom under the Hague Convention on Child Abduction. Geoff Hoon, Parliamentary Secretary at the Lord Chancellor's Department, said the Government acknowledged that the majority of fathers recognised their duties towards their children regardless of their marital relationship with the mother.
But he said the Government wanted to encourage the commitment of unmarried fathers by giving them legal status as parents. He said: "Many unmarried fathers are simply unaware of the existence of parental responsibility agreements or the fact that without one they do not have any legal status as the child's father." The majority of unmarried fathers signed the birth certificate jointly with the mother and in doing so they were making a commitment, said Mr Hoon.
He said: "I believe we should recognise this commitment and we have decided that signing the birth certificate should give unmarried fathers parental responsibility under the Children Act." The required change in the law may be included in the Modernisation of Justice Bill, which Lord Irvine, the Lord Chancellor, hopes to bring forward in the autumn.
