The Cafcass blank 2001: flawed origins
This next snapshot comes from 2000/2001, some three years after the 1998 announcement of the FCWS’s disbandment. Whitehall’s replacement for the FCWS - ‘Cafcass’ - was about to open its doors. Three years of preparation by the Lord Chancellor’s Department (‘LCD’) would come to fruition.
Nothing had been done to address the void that necessitated the FCWS’s disbandment.
The same old defect at the FCWS’s heart would roll forwards into the new heart of Cafcass.
Cafcass: dead on its 2001 arrival
By then every LCD official in every relevant departmental Section - and scores more besides - was fully aware of the problem. The exemplar correspondence in this tab represents the tiniest fragment of the written objections to the department’s inertia.
Three years before - within a few weeks of the February 1998 announcement of the FCWS’s disbandment - it had become apparent that the department was doing nothing useful on Section 8. This could be established by ‘negative evidence’. What the LCD needed to do (start work on a ‘training manual’) was perfectly clear. It was clear that nothing of the kind was in hand: n. No-one of standing had been approached and there were no plans to do so. It was soon clear exactly who in the LCD and the Home Office was not doing exactly what.
Family Law Reform: fiddling while Rome Burns
For three years the LCD, and many related agencies, were in receipt of an expanding torrent of widely-circulated suggestions on how the first steps towards useful remedial action might be taken. It will not assist to post this archive material; it all made the same single point, in a hundred different ways, to an ever-wider audience of family law professionals and officials - in their hundreds: that week by week for three years, through every twist and turn, in the face of severe opposition, Whitehall held to the wrong course.
On 1 April 2001 Cafcass came into being as a blank.
Cafcass and the Doctrine of Original Sin
Of course Whitehall had a lot on its plate. But its work on Cafcass was divisible into two clear segments. First, there was the administrative labour of setting Cafcass up; second, there was the matter of what Cafcass was meant to do in Section 8 cases - when it had been set up.
The administrative side was far from easy. The creation of Cafcass entailed merging the 660 probation officers in the FCWS (private law, Section 8); with 810 guardians ad litem in public law; and with the Official Solicitor's children’s branch (the OS handled tricky cases - international law etc). All in all, Cafcass’ workforce was assembled from 113 groups with 57 sets of pay and conditions. That was a lot to do, that was done.
The question of what to do next, with Cafcass' Section 8 workload, went by the board.
On 1 April 2001, the untrained probation officers in the FCWS transferred into Cafcass without (re)training. They were rebadged.
Click here to read the sample correspondence as Cafcass came naked to market (the guidelines referred to in the first letter, from the Minister, never saw the light of day; Anthony Hewson OBE of the second letter was Cafcass’s first chair (and David Lye the LCD lead official).