Family Justice

I am pleased that we have had the opportunity to debate such an important issue. I join those who paid tributes to the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mr. Beith) and the other members of the Select Committee for their report ““Family Justice: the operation of the family courts””. I agreed with much of what the right hon. Gentleman and the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke) said. Relationship education is important, as is access to early intervention. A lack of education and parenting skills is a problem in many cases. It is fair to say that the Minister has a lot of work in progress on the issues set out in the report. There are now between 150,000 and 200,000 separations a year; 30 per cent. of children are from a family in which there has been a separation. Usually, 80 per cent. of children remain with the mother. There is a lot in what has been said about the need for more information about what happens—particularly to contact—when a family breaks down. I welcome the major worthwhile research projects undertaken by the noble Baroness Ashton about what happens in contact cases. I agree that courts should be the last resort. If mediation, some other form of conciliation or consensus building is possible, that is obviously the best way forward. My experience of family cases has shown that often those who end up contesting them are people who feel deeply wounded by the facts and reasons for the separation and cannot drag themselves away from the extent to which they consider that they have been wronged in the process. Other issues that must be considered are finance, housing and concerns about security. We should not forget that, although the welfare of the child is paramount in such cases, the parents are vulnerable when the cases come to court or are being sorted out. It is worth paying tribute to the lawyers, CAFCASS workers and judges who work in the area. Although it is often said that it is an adversarial area, the mood of a family court is different from that in other courts. There is, these days, a mood among family lawyers of wanting to be consensual, to reach agreement and to find a way through a difficult experience for the parties involved. Often, it is not that the lawyers hold things back, but that the parties have no expectation of what the reasonable extent of an argument over contact should be. Often, one party will feel that there should be absolutely no contact, but the other party will feel that there should be a great deal more contact than a court would normally suggest, or that many of us would think was reasonable. It is against that background that it is right to consider it a difficult area. The Government's Green Paper on parental separation, which came out in June 2004, made clear what the extent of the damage can be when parental separation is badly handled. I agree that if an amicable settlement can be reached and both parents are actively involved in the welfare and raising of the child or children, the outcomes for everybody are much better. However, the reality is that an amicable settlement is not always possible. Domestic violence is a concern. There is a problem, as the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed said, of weeding out the cases in which there really is a safety issue from those cases that—although there are depths of despair in the relationship and parties may have come to blows—are different from cases of genuine abuse in which there is a worry and a fear about the safety of the children. It is difficult, without a finding of fact from the judge, to make such an assessment. That is a point that the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole made. One of the worries that I have—the right hon. Gentleman made the point—is that there are a lot of delays in the courts. He referred to the Law Society survey that showed that seven out of 10 cases in central London suffer from delays. Some of the examples that were given by the Law Society were rather striking. One case concerned Mrs. B, the mother of an autistic child, whose marriage broke up. She went away for the weekend and the husband built a wall in the family home, separating her from the main part of the house and confining her to a restricted area. She applied for an injunction to protect herself and to make him remove the wall. It took 10 months for the application to be listed. I am sure that the House will agree that that is not an acceptable length of time for such an urgent case. The Law Society has rightly launched a campaign to speed up the listing of family law cases. There are a lot of reasons why such cases are delayed. One reason—I know that the Government are looking at it—is that many judges have to add family work to their other duties, so that insufficient hours are available from the judges to deal with family cases. Something must be done to tackle that problem. Suggestions have been made that a streamlining of the system and more focus on mediation would improve matters. However, nobody should be in any doubt that it is an urgent problem that must be tackled. Another problem that leads to delays is that contact has become a much wider ambit of actions than it used to be. When the term access was first used, it was about face-to-face contact between a parent and a child. Courts are interpreting contact to mean everything from a letter once a year, or a birthday or Christmas card, to staying contact where the parent stays overnight with the child. That is a wide set of disposals. If a contact order is made that involves only writing letters or a phone call, it is inevitable that the parent who wants contact will come back to court. Rather than the court taking one bite at it and giving that sort of contact for a period and then the case coming back to court and another order being made, we should have guidelines under which there can, in more cases, be an escalating schedule of contact that goes from that minimal contact to something more meaningful. I hope that Ministers will consider that in relation to the Bill that is being considered in the House. As the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole said, the right to reasonable contact—at the moment, it is a right to contact—is important. She suggested guidelines that fall short of being absolutely set in stone, which the Select Committee does not want, but that are pretty clear. That would be helpful. If the court felt that it was under a duty to make orders that go from something minimal to something more substantive, rather than taking several bites at it, the delays could be less and those who are dissatisfied with the system would feel more satisfied. More substantive orders at an earlier stage would be good for the system generally. I move to the issue of professional advisers unnecessarily delaying proceedings. That is not really what happens. Obviously, from time to time people say that it happens, but generally, it is the lack of court time and the willingness of courts to make tiny orders on contact rather than more substantive orders that leads to the delays that we have. The role of CAFCASS has been mentioned. There has been a dire period as far as its work is concerned, but it is crucial, and I hope that some of the difficulties can be resolved. At one time, CAFCASS was devoted to writing long reports at great length. That was such a lengthy process that it gummed up the whole proceedings of the courts. I hope that it will be possible to have shorter, oral reports made in court and a much more problem-solving approach, and that that will lead to CAFCASS being able to do the job more effectively.