The Bar Council has repeated its calls for greater investment in the family justice system and the rollout of pathfinder courts in response to the National Audit Office (NAO) report ‘Improving family court services for children’. The report sets out the challenges in the family jurisdiction from the perspective of children in the system, including court delays and timeliness of cases, the lack of accountability for overall performance, and a lack of data on cost-effectiveness.
The report states: “There is no single organisation accountable to Parliament for overall performance on family justice,” and “there is no shared understanding of ‘what good looks like’ from the perspective of a child and there are no wider measures of performance to understand whether children and families receive a quality service from end to end and whether their issues are addressed.”
Commenting, Barbara Mills KC, Chair of the Bar Council, said:
“The NAO report makes sobering reading. Behind the statistics highlighting the 47,662 outstanding private and public law cases are the lives of children, stuck in the limbo of uncertainty about their future, who simply cannot and should not have to wait. The delay for these children is inimical to their welfare.
“A much more joined-up approach is essential to improving the performance of the family jurisdiction but that must go hand-in-hand with adequate funding. Cases are increasingly complex, yet access to legal aid continues to be limited. Last year four in ten cases had no legal representation for the applicants or respondents, adding time and pressure into the system. Greater investment in legal aid now would vastly improve the effectiveness of the family courts in the future.
“The upcoming Spending Review provides an opportunity to properly fund the family courts, reduce the delays and provide resolution for children and families.”
The NAO report also considers the pathfinder court pilots and states: “Early evaluations in two pilot areas showed that the redesign reduced delays, and staff reported improved experiences for children and families, including domestic abuse victims.”
Barbara Mills KC added: “As the NAO report states, the pathfinder courts are a real opportunity to improve the process for children and families and an example of how the government can spend to save. While local authority costs increased in the pilots, direct judicial costs halved. We’ve called for the national roll out of pathfinder courts, but it is essential that new courts are resourced to the same level as the pilots in order to realise the benefits.”
