Ms Margot Doherty:

I would like to talk about something that is not in the Bill. As the members are aware, unmarried fathers do not get guardianship rights from having their name on the birth certificate - many people do not know that - but they can get guardianship rights by signing a statutory declaration with the mother in front of a peace commissioner. That facility has been available since 1997 and, as members can imagine, there are thousands of these documents. We know that because in 2013 alone, 2,570 statutory declarations were downloaded from the Treoir website. In addition, a considerable number of parents telephoned asking for the guardianship form to be posted to them and the question that followed that request was "Where will I send it when it is signed?". We replied, to their amazement, that they should mind it carefully because there is nowhere they can send it. They are horrified by that. We had a case recently in which a father had lost his declaration and the mother was dying in hospital. He was very distressed. He did not know what to do, and there was nothing he could do apart from going to court at a later stage.

We have been calling for a central register for guardianship agreements for many years, and we call for it again now. We envisage a register whereby people could send their documents to be registered in a central place, and if they are lost they can get a copy. One can imagine what would happen if someone lost his or her marriage certificate and could not get a copy. It is the same in this case because that is from where one gets one's guardianship rights.

As Ms Dromey mentioned, cohabiting fathers of a year or more get their guardianship at the point of registration. If some sort of register is set up at that point it could include a register for recording the statutory declarations already signed. Ideally, we would see this register being located in the General Register Office. That is where people register births, marriages and deaths, and guardianship is very much a key component of that.

I would like to mention one or two other areas.