Policy Briefings

Key Benefits

• Providing additional powers to the courts to facilitate contact and enforce contact orders, including: power to make "contact activity directions" to require parties to attend activities such as information sessions, meetings with a counsellor, parenting programmes/classes, and the power to attach "contact activity conditions" to contact orders.
• When a contact order is breached (without a reasonable excuse), power for courts to impose enforcement orders for unpaid work, and power to award financial compensation from one person to another if the breach resulted in a financial loss.
• Reforming Family Assistance Orders to extend their potential length and remove the requirement that they can only be made in exceptional circumstances.

Measures relating to intercountry adoption, including:

• Providing a statutory framework for the suspension of intercountry adoptions from specified countries where there are public policy concerns about the process in that country, such as concerns about child trafficking.
• Giving the Secretary of State power to charge for the administration of intercountry adoption casework.
• Other reforms to improve the process of intercountry adoption.

Key Benefits

The measures will help to ensure that every child gets the best start in life; give families more choice about how to balance their work and caring responsibilities; help support employers in recruiting and retaining the best people; and promote social justice and fairness by:

• Extending maternity and adoption pay from six to nine months from April 2007, towards the goal of a year's paid leave by the end of the Parliament;
• Widening the scope of the existing law to enable those with wider caring responsibilities to request to work flexibly from April 2007;
• Introducing measures to help employers manage the administration of leave and pay and plan ahead with greater certainty;
• Providing an enabling power to extend the entitlement to 4 weeks leave, making it additional to time equivalent to bank (and public) holidays;
• Providing a one-off power to increase the maximum amount of a week's pay affecting compensation payments in connection with, in particular, redundancy, unfair dismissal and insolvency.

Key Benefits

The Bill takes forward the Paymaster General's announcement of 2 December 2004 that the Government would not tolerate the continuing use of schemes to avoid the payment of income tax and National Insurance Contributions (NICs).

The Bill is intended to deter those who have been engaged in tax and NICs avoidance and prevent them from benefiting from lower employment costs than those who do not engage in avoidance. It will have no effect on employers and employees who organise their affairs in a straightforward and ordinary way - the vast majority. In particular, genuine employee share schemes and share option plans will not be affected.

Once enacted, the Bill will give the Treasury the power to make anti-avoidance NICs regulations effective from the same date as the anti-avoidance tax measures to ensure that employers and employees using contrived schemes cannot avoid paying their correct NICs liability.

The Bill also allows regulations to be made which extend the tax avoidance disclosure rules to NICs avoidance arrangements, and ensures employers cannot pass on their NICs liability on past payments of share based earnings to their employees which are caught by the NICs regulations made under the Bill.

The Bill will safeguard £95 million in NICs in 2004-05 and a further £240 million per annum thereafter.

Key Benefits

Protects vulnerable consumers and serves to create a fairer and more competitive credit market by:

• enhancing consumer rights and redress by empowering consumers to challenge unfair lending and through providing more effective options for resolving disputes;
• improving the regulation of consumer credit businesses by ensuring fair practices and through targeted action to drive out rogues; and
• focussing regulation and protection on the agreements and borrowers where it is most needed and to create a fairer regime for business.

Key Benefits

Improves the registration process for voters, in particular by enabling people to register to vote after an election has been called and providing a new duty for registration officers to ensure comprehensive registers.

Establishes two new electoral offences (including an offence for fraudulent application for a postal vote)and extends the offence of undue influence to help protect against electoral fraud.

Introduces a framework for the Co-ordinated On-line Record of Electors (CORE) supporting national access and improving the security and integrity of electoral registers.

Enables Returning Officers to provide guidance to voters in a variety of languages and formats and provides a new power for Returning Officers to promote participation at elections.

Introduces clearer rules for candidates and political parties and sets a regulatory time period for measuring and controlling candidates' expenses.

Key Benefits

Sets out the legal framework to enable identity cards to be introduced throughout the United Kingdom and to create a National Identity Register.

Identity Cards will help:

• Tackle illegal working and immigration abuse;
• The prevention and detection of crime and counter-terrorism;
• Prevent identity theft and fraud;
• Prevent fraudulent access to public services;
• Enable easier and more convenient access to services;
• Allows verification of cards with consent of holder;
• Safeguards on provision of ID card information without consent;
• Creates new offences - fraudulent use of a card, possession of false identity documents, unauthorised disclosure of information by administrators of the scheme;
• Establishes National Identity Scheme Commissioner to review operation of the scheme - annual report to the Home Secretary laid before Parliament;
• Bill provides for compulsion to register at a later stage.