The EI flowchart

This was the new flowchart for an EI system put to the Minister at his first meeting with the NATC on 3 November 2003. It was commended by senior members of the judiciary and other leading family law professionals.

At that stage the NATC was unaware that the Minister was out of the loop. Papers given to the Minister, and then handed by the Minister to his officials to process, went into an oubliette. In today’s parlance, they were ‘cancelled’ - as officials carried on doing whatever it was they had been doing before.

Twenty years on, and despite every effort, these papers - and the EI proposal - have yet to be considered.

The Minister gave EI his best shot: he held four more meetings with the NATC. To the Minister’s face, his officials maintained EI was in progress; behind his back, it was buried.

With so little understood by Whitehall, and so many Whitehall fingers in the pie, zero managerial capacity is a real risk. So - to whom can reform be entrusted? To repeat the prescient reportage of the Bracewell J seminar (2003 Family Law 455):

“Final responsibility lay with the courts. The impetus for the seminar derived from judicial re-evaluation of the needs of court users; ongoing judicial direction provided the key to change.”

Child-contact reform: a straightforward solution

To see the EI flowchart click here. The centre-piece for any EI system is the authoritative guidance for parents on what to do for the best; given that, the remaining requirement for reform is merely to devise a way to let the parents know what that guidance is, in good time, before they first appear in court. The EI flowchart ticks that box.