The Family Drug and Alcohol Court: time to take the brakes off?

The Family Drug and Alcohol Court has been hailed as a “vital” service for helping families address substance misuse issues, yet access to this potentially life-changing approach remains a postcode lottery. Lottie Winson analyses how FDAC can benefit children and families, the financial impact for local authorities, and the barriers to a national rollout.

“We must move to the point where it is not a sign of merit to have a Family Drug and Alcohol Court, but an embarrassment not to have one,” were the words of Lord Justice Peter Jackson on 22 November 2024.

Speaking as the lead judge for FDAC at the Family Drug and Alcohol Court Judges Conference, he acclaimed the service as “the best way of achieving real culture change” in efforts to protect children from harmful parenting, while protecting them from unnecessary separation from their families.

However, with only 13 specialist teams, working in 19 courts and serving families in just 35 local authorities, what is preventing a larger-scale rollout?

The Family Drug and Alcohol Court (FDAC) is an alternative family court for care proceedings, specifically designed to work with parents who struggle with drug and alcohol misuse.

Pioneered by District Judge Nicholas Crichton, who drew inspiration from Family Treatment Courts in California and wanted to develop a similar problem-solving approach in England and Wales, the first FDAC was piloted at the Inner London Family Proceedings Court in 2008.

With multiple reports pointing to the success of the approach, calls have been made for a major expansion of the service. However, in an era of financial instability and necessary cutbacks for local authorities across England and Wales, this might be easier said than done.

Last chance saloon

Targeting families at the point where the prospect of losing their children is imminent, and who have not previously engaged with support, the Family Drug and Alcohol Court follows the same legal framework as standard care proceedings cases, but with some key distinctions in practice. During the FDAC process, a multi-disciplinary team provides expert advice to the court through a detailed assessment of the family, and delivers intensive support through a tailored intervention plan.

Families in FDAC care proceedings also benefit from a specially trained judge who remains consistent throughout the duration of the case, and meets with the family on a fortnightly basis. Judges therefore have the opportunity to get to know the parents properly, and keep up to date with any progress or changes, however minor.

“FDAC provides an opportunity of something different when we've tried everything else. It uses the court as leverage to create change, and the judge and the judiciary are part of the team around that family,” says Alison Street, Team Manager, Specialist Assessment and FDAC Team at Southampton City Council.

“Rather than seeing it as an adversarial process, they're part of the helping process, and we work in an intensive way within a multidisciplinary group of practitioners around that family.”

Rebecca Roberts, Section Head of Social Care (Legal) at Leeds City Council, which has had a local FDAC service since 2017, highlights the collaborative nature of the process.

She says: “You start off the proceedings on the basis that the parent acknowledges their issues, and that they accept the statutory threshold criteria for the making of a care order have been met.

“When local authorities make an application for section 31 care or supervision orders, they have to first be able to demonstrate to the court that the child has suffered, is suffering or is likely to suffer significant harm. And as part of the process within FDAC, that issue is dealt with at the very outset of the proceedings.

“So, I think the fact that the parent is acknowledging the issues, is taking stock, making all efforts to work with professionals in their journey to be able to overcome any dependencies they may have – it’s very much a collaborative approach.”

She adds: “It's very time intensive so there's an awful lot of support going on behind the scenes for parents and families from children’s services, the FDAC team, but also from the Judiciary as well.”

The Centre for Justice Innovation (CJI) is a charity which provides consultancy, technical advice and support to areas seeking to set up an FDAC. The organisation has played an instrumental role in supporting research and collecting statistics on FDAC, publishing quarterly reports on available data.

Looking at what the court aims to achieve, Sophie Carter, Head of Family Justice Practice at the CJI observes: “One of the key roles of the FDAC team is helping to coordinate the rest of the professionals and the team around the child and the family – which can be extremely difficult when you’re at crisis point. The team is a bit of a linchpin, holding all the spinning parts together but also making sure that the family is much better connected and able to effectively use available services at that really crucial, last chance saloon time.”

She adds: “We know that there’s a greater likelihood if you've had one child removed that you’ll be back in proceedings within the next three-year period with another child. So, it's very much around reducing that trauma, reducing the repeat removals, trying to interrupt the cycles of intergenerational trauma that families will talk to us about.”

It’s in the data

In 2023, the National Centre for Social Research compared outcomes for 130 families whose cases concluded in 14 FDACs across England in 2021 and 2022 to a matched sample of 116 families in standard proceedings, and found that 52% of children in FDAC were returned to their parents compared to only 13% of children in standard proceedings.

According to more recent data, in July – September 2024, 56% of children in FDAC proceedings were returned to their parents. A further 23% went to live with another parent, and 3% were assigned to live with family or friends.

In terms of the court’s impact on parental substance misuse, in the same quarter (July - September), 41% of parents using the FDAC service completely stopped using substances, while a further 5% reduced their alcohol use and 10% reduced their drug use.

Dan Clark, Service Manager, Family Safeguarding Central and Specialist Services at Southampton City Council notes: “We know it's better for children to be brought up within their families - preferably their parents’ care where it's safe to do so. They’re going to have better outcomes in the long term, particularly if we can help and support the parents to be the best that they can be.”

Another notable difference between standard proceedings and FDAC is a lower number of contested hearings – which has been attributed to the process being more transparent, and parents being given adequate time and support.

In July - September 2024, only 11% of FDAC cases ended with a contested hearing where the parent challenged the court’s decision, and only 26% of cases required an external expert assessment.

“If you're making a decision for a family who has had a really tailored intensive package of support for them that's been reviewed and checked in on, and understood, and questioned, and the families are still struggling - It's really difficult [for them] to say, well, I haven't been given the right opportunity,” notes Sophie Carter from the CJI.

“Whereas if you have a family [in standard proceedings] who's been told what they need to do, but they don't know what services they need to access, and they’ve had a long drift between different court hearings without people really being aware of what's happening - there's lots of room for the judges to say, I'm not really sure what's going on.

“So you then see these awful, contested hearings, where families are trying to pitch their case, social work teams are saying we now need another assessment, and judges are having to make really hard decisions.”

She adds: “With an FDAC you reduce all of that. They've been part of the process the whole way through, everything's open and transparent. So by the time you get to the end, there shouldn't be any surprises.”

However, there can be downsides to a process that allows more time for decisions to be made, if the outcome is not successful.

Rachel Chan, Barrister at 42 Bedford Row observes: “If [the process] doesn’t work, it can cause a lot of delay for the children for final decisions to be made. And if you have a child who is at an age known as ‘on the cusp’ – namely between long term foster care and adoption – that delay could make all the difference.”

Rebecca Roberts at Leeds City Council also acknowledges this concern.

She notes: “We have had a number of FDAC cases over the years where we've gone over the 26-week [statutory framework]. We've sought an extension potentially because we're looking to reunify within the time frame of the proceedings and there's a good likelihood that it’s going to be successful, but there have been some very sad cases where it's not been successful in the end. So it is very much a balancing act of the potentials for reunification, versus the delay if it doesn't work out.”

Alternative uses

In March last year, a judge sitting in the Family Court hailed the successful use of the FDAC model in a case where the main presenting difficulty was domestic abuse. In London Borough A v A & Ors [2024], District Judge Hughan, who heard the case at the Central Family Court, noted: “The FDAC model of working is absolutely suited to helping parents who are afflicted by domestic abuse to reflect on their experiences, to gain greater insight and to achieve required change. […]  I would urge local authorities to consider referring such cases to their local FDAC.”

At the Southampton FDAC, Alison Street and Dan Clark observe it is “extremely unusual” to have a standalone alcohol or drug misuse case. They note: “If we were just looking to work with parents who had substance misuse difficulties, we would have a very small cohort of families to work with. […] We accept that families bring all sorts of difficulties with them into the FDAC process – including mental health problems and domestic abuse.”

They add: “Although we haven’t yet worked with any parents purely experiencing something such as domestic abuse, some FDAC sites have used it that way quite successfully. […] It’s something that nationally people are looking at and considering.”

Worth the investment?

According to a financial analysis carried out by the CJI in 2024, FDAC can save local authorities £58,614 per case in placement costs in the five years after the end of proceedings, because children are “significantly more likely” to remain or be returned to the care of their parents compared to children in standard care proceedings.

The analysis, commissioned by the Department for Education, also found the Family Drug and Alcohol Court could save local authorities some £10,000 per case in legal costs compared to standard care proceedings.

The report concluded that even once set-up costs are taken into account, an FDAC service reaches a “break-even” point for local authorities in its second year of operations.

Sophie Carter from the CJI observes: “You’ve got immediate savings in terms of legal costs, but you’ve also got those long-term savings in terms of sustainability in placements, more children being able to return to their family or their wider families. And it’s not just the local authority children services that benefit – it’s also around how families can much more effectively use treatment services and healthcare services.”

However, against a backdrop of severe financial pressures for local authorities, she acknowledges that the savings accrued through an FDAC might unfortunately feel like “a drop in the ocean of the hole they are trying to fill.”

Obstacles to success

Speaking to professionals working within FDAC on the challenges faced by local authorities seeking to set up the service, the most common concern is simply resource pressures.

“Given that we’re all in a national funding crisis and local authorities are up against the wall – the problem is that they’re expected to fund this,” notes Amanda Jepson, a barrister at 42 Bedford Row.

“We’re now in a situation where we’re funding crises, and not intervention work, or not enough intervention work”, she warns.

And for local authorities lucky enough to have an FDAC already in place, there still remains a risk that the non-statutory service will be axed.

Sophie Carter says the main issue is that FDAC is not a statutory service. “It is on top of an already available, standard care proceedings process – even if that process isn’t as effective as we would like,” she notes. “[…] So when you have local authorities that are going bankrupt and they have to cease funding to all non-statutory services automatically regardless of if they don’t want to, they have to look at shutting their FDAC.”

Between October 2015 – March 2016, Leeds was one of five FDACs which opened in West Yorkshire, part funded by the Department for Education Innovation Programme. These FDAC teams served five courts across the region – Leeds, Bradford, Wakefield, Calderdale and Kirklees.

However, due to funding challenges, four of the local authorities were not able to continue within their local budgets despite the success of the respective teams.

Rebecca Roberts says: “I suppose it's about local authorities and children services within local authorities deciding what areas of their work are going to get priority based on the effectiveness of the service, and also whether there has been external funding along the way.”

In April last year, a circuit judge sitting in the Family Court expressed his regret that funding could not be secured for the Cardiff and Vale FDAC Pilot to be extended, resulting in a disbanding of the team behind the only FDAC court in Wales.

Many have called for the service to be nationally funded - in order to avoid it becoming a ‘postcode lottery’, only available to some. As it currently stands, FDAC is only available to 2% of children in care cases.

“The reality is, if the FDAC service is not available in your area and you’ve got a client that would suit that type of intervention – how can it be anything other than a postcode lottery?”, says Amanda Jepson.

“If you had a national rollout, funded by central government, then you’d take the pressure off local authorities, avoid there being a postcode lottery, and it would involve a saving to hopefully put the money elsewhere.”

It is therefore clear that any hesitation by local authorities to fund an FDAC is unlikely due to a lack of faith in the process, but rather a lack of means to fund it and keep it. Despite calls for an expansion of the service from the President of the Family Division and other leading Judges, this is not something that can be achieved with a snap of the fingers. However, with mounting evidence of the long-term financial benefits for local authorities and the positive impact on parents finally able to break cycles of damaging behaviour and reunite with their children, the achievements of this process cannot be ignored.

Lottie Winson is a reporter at Local Government Lawyer.