Therapy for parents pre-proceedings

There are powerful reasons why local authorities should consider the provision of therapy for parents pre-proceedings, writes Carrie Laws.

It has been announced by Bath and North East Somerset Council that it is exploring therapy for parents pre-proceedings – and the local authority has reported a transformational impact.  

So, why aren’t more local authorities exploring this? I have been in private practice representing parents and children for 15 years and have read thousands of psychological assessments in that time, a large percentage of which conclude that the parents require therapy and that the timescale for change is outside the child’s timescales. On almost every occasion that therapy cannot be accessed via the NHS due to significant under resourcing across all mental health services. Private therapy can be costly, and for many parents in care proceedings, they just don’t have sufficient financial stability to self-fund. I have experienced cases where the parent has shop-lifted in order to fund therapy. Permanence is then secured elsewhere for those children, usually after an emotionally draining court hearing where the parent fights with all they have for the return of their child. Subsequent children will then be subject to proceedings with the local authority relying in part on the recommended therapy having not been accessed - and so the cycle continues.

I have frequently asked the local authority why they don’t fund the therapy instead of issuing proceedings and the response is invariably that the authority doesn’t have the funds for therapy, and that isn’t the role of children’s services. More recently, the response has been that it isn’t for children’s services to prop up the NHS. Arguably there is a role for children’s services to fund therapy to fully explore the potential to make and sustain change to give the child the best chance of remaining with or returning to their parents – the focus must be on the benefit to the child of their parents receiving therapy rather than the benefit to the parents, but it strikes me that this element is often overlooked by local authorities whose default position is “that’s not our role.” It costs the local authority more than £2,000 to issue care proceedings and the cost to the public purse of each set of proceedings will easily run into tens of thousands. I’ve often wondered how many thousands of pounds would have been saved had the local authority funded therapy at an earlier stage.

Sir Andrew McFarlane, President of the Family Division, relaunched the PLO process earlier this year with a view to reducing the number of cases before the family court and to shorten the time it takes to conclude those that are issued to within the statutory timeframe. It follows then that there is even more reason to offer and engage parents in therapy during the PLO process, something currently being trialled by BANES council, with a view to breaking intergenerational patterns and allowing every opportunity for children to stay with the parents and receive safe parenting. 

When I look back at the many cases I have held over the last 15 years, it is clear that in a significant number of them (too significant to be ignored), the outcomes may well have been different had therapy been accessible. Of course, this is not something that will work for every family, but there is every potential that this pilot will prove transformational, and I hope that BANES is successful in its aim to spread its learning and work with other local authorities to collectively provide this essential therapeutic support for families at the pre-proceedings stage. I am excited to see this progress regionally and it is my sincere hope that access to therapy will become a staple offering within my professional life-time.

Carrie Laws is a Director at the Family Law Company.