Family justice system "incoherent"

Family law practitioners have welcomed the Norgrove Reports’s proposals to reduce delay in the courts but warned their effect could be hindered by legal aid cuts.

In its final report, published this week, the Family Justice Review panel calls for a six-month time limit in child care cases, more specialist family judges and a simplified court structure.

The panel, chaired by David Norgrove, recommends there be less reliance on “unnecessary” expert witnesses and reports, and that the courts re-focus on the core issue of whether the child should go into care.

It calls for a raft of reforms where separating couples are making arrangements over children and finance, including: greater use of mediation; new “child arrangements orders” and “parenting agreements” to replace “contact” and “residence”; and a single online and phone help service to make it easier for people to decide the best way forward.

The Norgrove review has highlighted how rising caseloads and “incoherent” organisation has led to a backlog of cases—on average, it takes more than a year to conclude a child care case.

In his foreword to the review, Norgrove calls the family justice system “a system that is not a system, characterised by mutual distrust and a lack of leadership, by incoherence and without solid evidence based knowledge about how it really works. The consequence for children is unconscionable delay that has continued to increase since we began our work”.

These delays contribute to the average two years and seven months that it takes for children to be adopted, and with 20,000 children currently awaiting a decision delays are likely to increase, he says.

Stephen Cobb QC, chair of the Family Law Bar Association (FLBA), welcomes the report’s key proposals but warns government proposals to cut legal aid will increase pressure on the courts.

“If we take one key message from these proposals, it is the proposed eradication of delay in the resolution of disputes concerning children,” he says.

“In this respect, the Family Justice Review is right to be concerned by the inevitable rise in the number of unrepresented litigants who will populate the family courts if the legal aid proposals are implemented as drafted. While the Review Panel points to various strategies to assist parties in resolving disputes away from the courts, or to assist them while unrepresented in the courts, the panel rightly reflects that these initiatives ‘are by no means a full answer’ to what we believe will be a very serious problem.”

Welcoming the panel’s findings, David Allison, chair of Resolution, says: “The publication of the final report the day after the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill leaves the House of Commons demonstrates the fragmented nature of the government’s approach to family law.

“The negative effect of the legal aid changes—not least the inevitable rise of the number of people representing themselves in court (litigants in person)—is an area of particular concern raised in the report.”