The 2003 Parenting Time Reform Seminar (EI)

Delegates at this judicially-chaired seminar included three Lords of Appeal. A simple EI protocol was presented and endorsed - on the footing that the development of judicially-approved guidelines for normative cases would enable a benign reworking of the court-process.

Child contact family law reform

The weight of the legal system would necessarily shift: from the provision of limitless facilities for litigation after the first hearing to the provision of best-interests guidance before the first hearing - with a view to achieving a pre-hearing consent order - informed by best-interests guidance - approved by judiciary - and developed in conjunction with proper experts.

Child-contact: disseminating the guidance

As soon as judicially-approved guidance is available, it can be posted on a court’s website, to be adopted and distributed by lay and professional advisors. This helps nip disputes in the bud for the population at large, without their going to law.

For parents who do issue proceedings, the guidance would be incorporated in the court’s pre-hearing parent education and mediation processes - to encourage best-interests pre-court settlements.

These sessions would be scheduled by the court, to the court’s timetable, in the ten-week gap after proceedings were issued, before the first actual court appearance. Parents could ‘exit the system’.

Child contact: a reformed legal system

The outline of the proposed new system was:

• the court responds to new applications - by sending the guidance to both parents

• pre-court classes for parents, scheduled and run by the court, reinforce that guidance

• resistant parents attend an additional ‘pre-court contact-focussed mediation’ session

• routine cases are encouraged to exit-the-system on a consent order

  - informed by what the court was likely to order

• a first hearing at around 12 weeks makes opposed orders for the residual non-substantive cases

Parents with routine cases would not have to litigate; cases with complications would be referred forwards for processing in the usual way.

The EI model proposed at this Seminar retained the usual provisions for safety; the provision for emergency hearings is enhanced.

The only reform on child contact with judicial approvals

Summing up after the Seminar on 15 July 2003, the late Dame Joyanne Bracewell DBE said:

 ‘These cases … are immensely expensive, they produce very little result; they clog up the courts. We waste valuable resources: money and the court’s time.  If only our caseload were approached differently, we could allocate our time better, concentrating on cases which really do need judicial intervention. Many long-running disputes might never become bogged down if there were proficient early interventions….

‘We must endeavour to effect improvement, so that we become part of the solution not the problem along the lines discussed here today. A pilot scheme has my strong support … this is the way forward… it would be incomprehensible if the pilot project did not receive official sanction. The pilot does not involve a huge investment; it would achieve savings in money and court time.’

The Seminar was reported in 2003 Family Law 455. The report concluded:

“the need was not so much for an open-ended inquiry into what to do, but rather the more proactive task of ensuring that an early-interventions trial – where court education and mediation worked together – actually occurred. 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.”

The next step was to put the EI project up for implementation to the Minister and Whitehall.

Cafcass: Ground Zero

There Cafcass lay in wait - and this, as it were, brings us to where we still are now.

On the one hand, there is a transformative family law reform project, ready-to-go, with senior judicial approvals. And, on the other, there is Whitehall and Cafcass with their eyes firmly closed - most likely because they cannot accept that Cafcass has no guidance on the issue in dispute. The EI reform was derailed, and the primary strands of this story since 2003, as the needs for EI grows, have been:

(i) continuing “let’s get on with it” high-level professional endorsements for reform

(ii) endeavours by Whitehall and Cafcass to prevent useful change

Click here for the full Seminar Proceedings.

Cafcass: the Cart before the Horse

This 2003 proposal is still decades ahead of anything contemplated by Whitehall in the 2020s. Officialdom continues oblivious to the fact that there is no guidance on the issue in dispute. Information for parents is set to continue indefinitely on this basis.

Guidance of this type (‘we have no guidance’) is of no particular interest to parents: it fills no need. That means there is no eager audience, no take-up, and nothing for parents or professionals to pass on. Unwanted and unneeded guidance of no significance can only be distributed to the indifferent if they are force-fed; for instance, if large-scale apparatus is set up - to distribute the information that no-one wants or needs.

Hence Whitehall’s blue-skies scheme to construct an elaborate ‘distribution network’ of new hierarchies of interlinked agencies - to dispense guidance - in the absence of guidance to dispense.

By contrast, EI guidance that everyone does want and needs - ‘how much contact should I allow?’ / ‘how much contact should I seek? - will self-distribute for free, passed hand-to-hand, almost overnight, to reach parents who need it when they need it.

EI, first proposed in 2003, has yet to be considered. Officialdom We have yet to arrive at the insight that there is no guidance.