Family Justice

: We need to keep the matter under review, but I think that it is making progress. Some of the people who work for CAFCASS are absolute jewels—people who do an incredibly difficult job extremely well, but that has not been the overall perception of the organisation. It is right that we should expect high standards from it, and I certainly do not disagree with the Select Committee report on CAFCASS, which pointed to some appalling problems. As with everything, it is easy to ignore the fact that, in extremely difficult jobs, there will always be people who do not reach the top standard, but we should not forget the ones who do. There are some good people working in the family law arena. Will the Minister comment on the way in which the courts will be streamlined to reduce delays? Obviously, some cases will have to be determined by the courts, regardless of all activities that are put forward to encourage mediation and the like. Will she confirm that there is no intention to remove the role of judges, district judges and magistrates from the system? Such an assurance would be helpful. There will always be a class of case where they are needed. The Government also need to concentrate their efforts on issues such as the crisis in legal aid. My hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon (Mr. Djanogly) asked questions about that last summer and received the reply on 27 June at column 1332W of Hansard that a third of the firms dealing with family law had given up doing legal aid work in the previous five years. That is clearly worrying in terms of access to justice. I would be grateful to hear what the Minister intends to do about it. I know that Lord Carter is examining the issue but, even so, the fall is dramatic. I am also worried about court fees. This week, the Government have confirmed a massive increase in fees. Parents trying to secure a contact order will have to pay a court fee, which has increased from £30 to £175. On 10 January, the president of the Law Society, Kevin Meehan said:"““This places a heavy burden on low income families who simply want the best for their children. The financial benefits of the courts being self funded have not been demonstrated and so this looks like another stealth tax””." The Law Society is also concerned about two other effects. The first is the effect on the legal aid budget, where there will be less money available for services. The other is the effect on local authorities when they have to apply for a care order. The cost of applying for such an order has increased from £50 to £150—a rise of 200 per cent. It is difficult to work out how that can be in the interests of family justice. I would be grateful to hear the Minister's comments on that. On the question of mediation, we are not convinced that the family resolutions pilot project is the best way of tacking the issue. We support the idea that there should be early intervention. The well known family barrister, Caroline Willbourne, who is now a district judge, suggested looking to the early interventions project in Florida two or three years ago, which has been mentioned. The essence of it is that couples were shown at an early stage the sorts of orders that a court would make if they did not reach an agreement on contact. They were known as parenting plans and were effective in giving guidance to people about what the reasonable ambit of argument might be. A couple who were not very educated in these matters and who were robustly arguing with one another at least knew what the reasonable area of argument was. It was a successful scheme in Florida. It concentrated minds and gave parents an early idea of the realistic ambit of debate. Interestingly, the chairman of the Family Law Bar Association, Philip Moor QC, is cited in paragraph 100 of the report. He stated:"““We strongly support the Early Interventions Pilot Project (which has become the Family Resolutions Project). There is a slight problem with that and that is in our view the parenting plans were a good idea and we liked the idea that you have a sort of template for these cases and that the parents that went into the system knew that unless there was something pretty exceptional in the case the template was the sort of order that the court would be thinking of making. We thought that set things out pretty clearly for them at the beginning and that is a project that we would like to see carried through . . . We would like to see the parenting plans in there and we would like it to be pretty well known that that is what the judges are going to do if the mediation breaks down and there are no good reasons for a change from the parenting plans.””" Of course, Philip Moor QC is extremely experienced in this area of law. The Minister knows quite a lot about it and is certainly capable of finding out a good deal about it very easily. I do not know if I ought to declare that Caroline Willbourne was in my chambers, but she knows about this area, and so does Mr. Moor. The Minister has good access to people who know about this subject. If somebody does not understand the system, it is helpful to give them a clue at the beginning of the process about what the sensible area of argument is. I will not go on too much more about it, but it would be worth getting that sorted out. The parenting plans that the Government have brought forward are worthy, but wishy-washy. The plans say that there is no template for contact, and although they say some good things, they are not really focusing enough to be any use to the practitioner who is talking to a parent when the need is there to explain things in a simple or straightforward way. The point is that it is not being dealt with as the Florida project was. My right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May), who was dealing with this issue until November, received information in November saying that of the 62 couples who participated in the project from September 2004 to September 2005, only half completed all parts, despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of pounds were devoted to it. If that fact is taken together with the information put forward by the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole about how few took part, it is a worrying picture for the pilots. Most people who are involved in family law think that there is something there that could be built on, but it is probably a bit more like Florida and a bit less like the family resolutions pilot. I shall turn now to the question of presumptions. Obviously, the presumption that the welfare of the child is paramount is important and should be the main focus of a child's case. Having said that, however, something needs to be done to get the idea of co-parenting, including contact being reasonable and being expected, and the right of the child more firmly up the list of things that a judge considers in such cases. I am not sure that the welfare checklist is enough on its own, so I welcome what the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole said about the statutory right to reasonable contact being somewhere in the Bill. Something like that would be a good way forward, particularly if it were backed up by the sort of guidelines about which we have been talking. I think that we could move more in the direction of compulsory mediation and, as far as the court system is concerned, we need to open up the closed doors a bit more. I agree with the Minister that the culture of secrecy has not done much to instil confidence. If we are going to be able to scrutinise this area, something needs to be done. Indeed, something is being done. The Select Committee concluded that although there is disagreement as to whether all the criticism of the system of family justice is justified, it is widely agreed that reform is needed. We agree with that and look forward to hearing from the Government the full extent of how they intend to proceed. However, we recognise that a lot of what is going on at the moment is work in progress.