Senior family judge calls for attention on process before care applications issued

The process undertaken in the months, weeks and days before a care application is issued is “ripe for attention”, the President of the Family Division has said.

Giving the key note address, “Crisis; What Crisis?”, at the Association of Lawyers for Children Conference 2018, Sir Andrew McFarlane said that this was “with the aim of either diverting some cases away from court or, at least, ensuring those cases that come to court are, as it were, ‘match-fit’ for engagement in the court process at Day One”.

The Family President also said:

• The developing practice, in some areas, of sending children home under a care order at the end of proceedings, and, separately, making Special Guardianship orders to those with whom the child does not yet have a firm relationship, also justified detailed consideration, “both in terms of its impact on case numbers (where such arrangements break down and lead to fresh court proceedings) but, in terms whether the 26 week deadline may, in some cases, be having an adverse impact”.
• There was a need to consider whether there was a better way, and a better time, for the court to take in and determine issues relating to new-born babies.
• Substantial changes needed to be considered to the court process when dealing with disputes between parents about the arrangements for their children. “In addition, and more generally, there is a pressing need to manage the expectations of separating parents, at the earliest stage, as to what going to court involves and what a court can, and cannot, do in such cases.”

Sir Andrew meanwhile said that his predecessor, Sir James Munby, had been fully justified in using the word ‘crisis’ to draw attention to the developing situation in 2016, “at a time when we did not understand what was occurring or why”, when the number of applications being made each month by local authorities for care or supervision orders in relation to children was rising sharply.

However, the Family President argued that that word was no longer apt “as there is now a fairly clear and developing understanding of these matters and a set of strategies that are being developed to address the pressures in the system”.

The judge said that in future he intended to use the phrase ‘workload challenge’ to refer to “the acute difficulties that we are all currently facing”.

Sir Andrew said: “In terms of what we understand and the focus of work to address the Workload Challenge, it seems clear that the number of children across the child care system has simply gone up by an order of 25% in the past 2 or 3 years; the water table has simply risen. This rise may be as a result of major factors in the current societal and economic situation; if so, such factors are well outside the control of social workers, lawyers, judges and courts.”