Alison Hume MP: speeches

Speeches

• 10 Jun 2026 · Child Contact Arrangements · Hansard source

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  I have raised with Baroness Levitt not only the lack of access to child contact centres but the cost of access. It appears that many of them are unregulated, so I thank the hon. Gentleman for raising that issue. To conclude, everybody wants to see the family justice system evolve to better recognise children’s lived experiences, support safer and more effective participation, and make decisions that promote long-term recovery and healthy outcomes. I ask the Government to seize the opportunity presented by the Courts and Tribunals Bill to totally discredit the use of experts who subscribe to parental alienation and to enshrine the rights of the child in law, to ensure that those speaking their truth are properly heard.

• 10 Jun 2026 · Child Contact Arrangements · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend for her work on the issue. I completely agree that unfortunately we are seeing far, far too many mothers who are disbelieved and have had their children removed from them without any basis for doing so at all. Lives are being destroyed. If a parent complains, there is a very significant risk that that will be used against them. Ultimately, it should not matter whether an expert is regulated or unregulated if regulated and unregulated experts both rely on the same harmful pseudoscience and inflict equally devastating consequences, particularly on mothers and their children. The advice provided by experts can have a significant influence on the judge’s decision about child contact arrangements: the Ministry of Justice’s 2020 harm report highlighted the fact that allegations of parental alienation are often accepted by the family court without robust scrutiny. Evidence from survivors continues to show that counter-allegations of parental alienation are taken more seriously than those of domestic abuse. In many cases, claims of alienation can lead to the child being removed from the survivor parent, despite existing evidence of abuse. A constituent of mine had her children removed in an alienation case when the theory was introduced after she alleged domestic abuse. The non-profit Right to Equality has conducted a large-scale survey of mothers whose children were removed from their care in private law proceedings. The survey reveals concerning patterns around child removal, including the role of parental alienation allegations, limited fact-finding on abuse and the influence of expert recommendations. In total, the 217 mothers had 342 children removed from their care. That is quite clearly not in the best interests of those children and is deeply traumatic for their mothers. I have heard countless seriously concerning stories about children put into high-risk arrangements by the family court. Julia Margo, the co-founder of the charity Fair Hearing, with which I have been working closely, had a traumatic experience with the family justice system. After discovering that her former partner had been convicted of child sexual abuse, she endured years of legal battles, during which he took her to court 37 times demanding access to their children. Meanwhile, she felt dismissed and disbelieved by the system. She said that the court seemed more concerned about the risk of parental alienation than about the safety of her sons being left alone with a paedophile. In another case, a child was taken away from her mother without warning at 10 years old. That day, a social worker came to the house and told her that she had half an hour to pack her things. The child recalled: “I stuffed my favourite outfit in a bag—this blue shirt and leggings—along with a photo of me and mum. And then I got this bunny, my favourite soft toy, and I left it on her bed. It is what mum would do for me if she ever had to go away.” The young girl later discovered that that simple goodbye had been used to criticise her mother, who had been her main carer since her parents had separated two years earlier. She said: “The social worker said to my mum that no child should be worried about their parent’s feelings, and it was a sign of abuse.” At 12 years old, the child wrote to the president of the family division, England’s most senior family judge, seeking the representation that she was previously denied. A district judge had found abuse from her father and found that her mother harboured a great deal of anger against him. A consultant psychiatrist, Dr Mark Berelowitz, was then brought into the case and claimed that the reason she was opposed to seeing her father was that she had been subjected to her mother’s “unresolved angry feelings about the breakdown of their relationship.” The judge then ordered that the child should move to live with her father, as her mother was not giving her emotional permission to enjoy a relationship with her father. It is clear that in this case, as in so many others, parental alienation allegations represented the complete disregard of a child’s wishes during the court process. In the child’s words: “I was removed from my mother’s care within hours of a court order being made…I spent the ensuing five years faced with professional after professional who refused to believe me. They said I was repeating my mother’s words and that, despite findings of domestic abuse, it was better to have a relationship with the person who frightened me.” Parental alienation is a harmful ideology that profoundly impacts children. However, there are signs that the winds of change may now be moving through the family courts. In February this year, the president of the family division handed down a landmark judgment dismissing findings of so-called alienation against the mother. She had been prohibited from seeing her children for five years after alleging abuse in private family law proceedings. Lawyers have since characterised the initial ruling as draconian and extraordinary. In December 2019, the court ordered that the children, who were then aged nine and 12, be removed, and it granted the father sole custody. The evidence was given by an unregulated psychologist, Melanie Gill. In overturning court findings informed by Gill’s reports, the president of the family division’s ruling could open the door for other families assessed by Gill, who has acted as an expert witness in up to 200 cases. Guidance published by the Family Justice Council in December 2024 says that experts should not be appointed to look for alienation; instead, judges should take a factual approach to identifying specific alienating behaviours. It was this new information that enabled the mother to bring her case back to court. In a historic part of the judgment, the president of the family division has recognised the significant barriers that mothers face when seeking to appeal and has asked the Family Justice Council to consider an alternative procedural approach proposed by the legal team representing the mother and her son. I urge the Family Justice Council to consider that proposal as a matter of urgency, so that children and their parents who have been wrongfully separated because of pseudoscientific claims can finally have their cases reviewed. However, there is still more work to be done. Hundreds of children and mothers have been wrongfully separated by family courts in England and Wales. This is a matter of national shame. Although the 2024 guidance and recent judgment from Sir Andrew McFarlane are clear and consistent, there is a risk that by themselves they will not be able to prevent the underlying error. As a route to justice, such judgments depend on the protective parent securing legal representation, identifying the procedural defect and bringing a part 18 application to set aside, years after the original order. As I have mentioned, the president of the family division himself has acknowledged that mothers in this position face significant barriers to appeal. That is why I have been working on an amendment to the Courts and Tribunals Bill; I am grateful to Baroness Levitt KC, the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, for the time she has taken to discuss it with me. Through the amendment, I propose to introduce a statutory presumption operating at the front end of proceedings, before findings of fact are made and before residence is disturbed. That would effectively prevent harm, rather than relying on a remedial route that few will successfully be able to navigate. We need to ensure that the family justice system is reformed so that the voice of the child is always put at the centre of proceedings, and so that allegations of alienation never take precedence over allegations of abuse. I welcome the fact that, thanks to timeless campaigning by the indomitable Claire Throssell and by my hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Dr Tidball) the Courts and Tribunals Bill will repeal the presumption of parental involvement set out in the Children Act 1989. This is a long-overdue correction to the pro-contact culture identified in the 2020 harm report and will address what the court must presume about contact in general. I also welcome the Government’s rolling out of child-focused courts nationally, which will put children at the centre of proceedings and resolve cases quicker. An important question remains unaddressed, however: when a child resists or refuses contact with a parent against whom abuse is alleged, what weight should the court give to that response as evidence? That gap is currently doing significant harm. Too often, in current practice, the answer has been to reframe that resistance as the product of so-called alienating behaviour by the protected parent. Doing so risks reinterpreting the child’s voice not as a possible indicator of harm, but as evidence of manipulation. I am also aware of cases in which a child discloses abuse by their father, particularly child sexual abuse, and those disclosures are then used as evidence of alienation against their mother, meaning that when a child makes a disclosure it can work against the mother, who risks losing the child. My simple amendment would effectively prevent the use of counterclaims of alienation to undermine or distract from allegations of domestic abuse, and would ensure that the child’s evidence has the weight that it deserves. Does the Minister agree that for many of the hundreds of children and mothers who have been forcibly separated, the route to justice through appeal is hard to access? Does she agree that further reform is urgently needed to ensure that children’s voices carry the evidential weight that they should carry in family court proceedings? Does she support strengthening the Courts and Tribunals Bill further so that if a child has experienced or witnessed abuse, the child’s not wanting to see the perpetrator is first assumed to be a reasonable reaction in the family courts?

• 10 Jun 2026 · Child Contact Arrangements · Hansard source

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  I beg to move, That this House has considered children in child contact arrangements. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Murrison, and to lead a debate on putting children first in child contact arrangements, an issue that is of great importance to me, to my constituents and to other Members of this House. When parents have separated and children are involved, they often turn to the family court. Family courts are at the centre of a child’s right to safe family arrangements. However, so many are not functioning in the child’s best interests. Allegations of domestic abuse are estimated to occur in up to 62% of private law cases under the Children Act 1989 in family courts in England and Wales, and counterclaims of parental alienation are increasingly being made in response to allegations of abuse. So-called parental alienation syndrome is when one parent undermines or destroys the child’s relationship to the other parent through a pattern of manipulative behaviour. It is a pseudoscientific concept with no basis in law or medicine. However, accusations of parental alienation have been made on multiple occasions by unregulated experts appointed to assess the family and provide recommendations to the court.

• 21 May 2026 · Family Justice System: Domestic Abuse and Safeguarding · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Furniss. I congratulate the hon. Member for Wokingham (Clive Jones) on securing this important debate and on his excellent opening speech. There are countless amazing organisations across the country that support victims of domestic abuse. I pay tribute to Independent Domestic Abuse Services, the largest specialist charity in Yorkshire, which does sterling work to support my constituents in Scarborough and Whitby. It is clear that our family justice system needs urgent reform to ensure that children are at the heart of proceedings. That was made incredibly clear to me earlier this week when I chaired a roundtable with charities, legal professionals and women with lived experience about improving outcomes for children in domestic abuse cases. Everyone on the panel agreed that children’s voices are lost in the system. One of the many inspirational speakers was Julia Margo, co-founder of the charity Fair Hearing. After experiencing the unimaginable—discovering that her partner, the father of her two children, was a convicted child sex offender—her ordeal was continued by the family court system, as her ex-partner claimed legal aid and took her to court 37 times over the next eight years to demand access to their children. About the process, she said: “The lawyers, magistrates and judges seemed to look on me as a hysteric, whose claims of trauma were exaggerated…The courts were more worried about ‘parental alienation’—that I should turn our sons against their father—than about two little boys being left alone with a paedophile.” Since being elected to Parliament, I have been motivated by a brave constituent to work on reforming the family courts so that abusive partners cannot claim parental alienation to undermine and silence survivors and influence child contact arrangements. In recent years, there has been a rise in the use of experts to “prove” alienation—a pseudoscientific concept with no basis in law or medicine. A perpetrator of abuse will allege that a child’s refusal of contact or reluctance towards it is due to the survivor parent alienating the child from them. That has led to survivors having their children removed from them, which is against the interests of the child and the mother. The non-profit Right to Equality conducted a large-scale survey of mothers whose children were removed from their care in private law proceedings. The survey reveals concerning patterns around child removal, including the role of parental alienation allegations, limited fact finding on abuse and the influence of expert recommendations. In total, the 217 mothers had 342 children removed from their care. That is clearly not in the best interests of those children and is deeply traumatic for the mothers. I welcome the fact that the Government are rolling out child-focused courts nationally, which will put children at the centre of proceedings and will resolve cases more quickly, saving children months of trauma. Repealing the presumption of parental involvement—a long-overdue correction to a pro-contact culture that has failed to put children first—is a brilliant step forward. However, there is still a gap in legislation that risks the wellbeing of children in private family law proceedings. It simply does not address the question of what happens when a child resists or refuses contact with a party against whom abuse is alleged. What evidential weight does the court give to the child’s response? I am currently drafting an amendment to the Courts and Tribunals Bill that aims to stop counter-allegations of alienation being used to undermine or distract from reports of domestic abuse. It would ensure that the child’s evidence has the weight that it deserves. It would ensure that a child’s resistance towards an abusive parent is treated not as evidence of manipulation, but as evidence of harm. When a child is reluctant or refuses to spend time with a person against whom allegations of domestic abuse have been made, it should be regarded as reasonable and justified. As the Government move forward with putting children at the heart of the family justice system, will the Minister commit to working with Parliament on changes to ensure that a child’s resistance to contact with an abusive parent is treated as credible evidence of harm and not of manipulation?

• 21 Apr 2026 · Wheelchair Provision: Independent Review Body · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Murrison. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Daniel Francis) on securing this important debate, and on his excellent speech, which drew on his lived experience. I contribute to this debate on behalf of the many constituents in Scarborough and Whitby who have been profoundly failed by NHS-contracted wheelchair services. One such constituent is a woman in her early 80s, who became reliant on an electric wheelchair to leave the house following a traumatic road accident. Her family and friends reached out to me after failing to be told when a wheelchair might be provided and not being offered any interim support. At that point, all the necessary adaptations to accommodate the wheelchair had already been made to the outside of her home. AJM Healthcare, which is contracted by NHS wheelchair services, was contacted for an urgent update but was completely unable to provide a specific timeframe for the progress of her application. Two years ago, AJM Healthcare was investigated by the parliamentary ombudsman following a surge in complaints. As we have heard, those involved people not receiving new wheelchairs or the correct parts, delays to receiving equipment and poor communication. Two years on, sadly, it seems that nothing has changed. Other constituents have also come up against significant delays to wheelchair repairs, leading them to become prisoners in their own homes. One resident requested my help after being housebound for three months while waiting for the supplier simply to send on the correct replacement parts. Another constituent endured three months of delays over a routine maintenance issue, only to discover after countless unanswered calls that the repairs company had gone into liquidation. It is clear that the current system is not working. Wheelchair providers are failing to meet even the most basic standards, leaving people isolated, housebound and ignored. What is worse, they are getting away with it. Despite repeated complaints and investigations, failing providers are still contracted and continue to offer an appalling service to people such as my constituents. My constituents deserve better. Waiting months for a wheelchair or essential repairs is unacceptable, and it is high time that wheelchair service providers were held to account by an independent national regulator. I look forward to hearing from the Minister about how the Government plan finally to put an end to this catalogue of failure.

• 19 Nov 2025 · Myalgic Encephalomyelitis · Hansard source

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  It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Mr Mundell. A constituent recently wrote to me: “ME has taken almost everything from me. I can no longer work, I am mainly confined to my chair or bed and, on the rare occasion that I leave the house for medical appointments, I need to use a wheelchair or walker and it often results in PEM”, or post-exertional malaise. This was the sentence that really stayed with me: “ME has taken almost everything from me.” That seems to sum up the decimating effects of ME for the 25% of sufferers who experience the most severe symptoms. ME takes and then it takes some more, until in too many tragic cases the patient dies. The fate of patients with severe ME has been brought home to me through my involvement with my constituent Debbie Seymour, once a working mother of two but now into her third year of being bedbound in a dark room and principally cared for by her incredible mum Sylvia, who is in her 80s. Although nurses are offering practical support, there remains a lack of knowledge about severe ME among healthcare providers and allied professions—particularly about the nature of the key diagnostic symptom of the disease, PEM. Too often, sufferers of severe ME are required to fit into NHS pathways and procedures that suit the system but take little account of the human being at the centre of them. I welcome the Government’s delivery plan on ME. One of the stated aims is for the Department of Health and Social Care and NHS England to explore whether there should be a specialised service for very severe ME. NHS England is in the process of being dismantled, so could the Minister confirm in her summing up that that exploration will still go ahead? The desperate experiences of so many people highlight a lack of research into the disease. Perhaps the Minister can reassure my constituents in Scarborough and Whitby that there is a future in which the ringfenced funding granted for research into other illnesses can be extended to ME. In conclusion, I have felt helpless when it comes to supporting my constituents who suffer from severe ME, and their families and carers. I am putting my faith in this Labour Government to drive forward the research to find a cure for this devastating disease and to improve specialist care for seriously ill ME patients such as Debbie, before it is too late.

• 7 Jul 2025 · Domestic Abuse: Joint Tenancies · Hansard source

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  My constituent Molly is trapped in the house where she was violently attacked in front of her children. She is confined to living upstairs, because going into the room downstairs triggers her post-traumatic stress disorder. Despite the perpetrator of this abuse rightfully being in prison and having a restraining order of five years, Molly’s landlord has told her that they cannot take him off the lease, so she cannot move. Can the Minister confirm that the Government are taking steps to ensure that victims of domestic abuse, like Molly, can move on with their lives?