New
family protocol to speed up childcare cases
http://www.thelawyer.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=107504
The
Lawyer - 4th November 2003
The Government promised to cut down delays in childcare cases with the
launch of a new judicial protocol last week. According to the Department
for Constitutional Affairs, the ‘Protocol for Judicial Case Management
in Public Law Children Act Cases’ was “the centrepiece”
of the Government’s programme to reduce unnecessary delays in
Children Act cases that normally last almost a year.
“This
new protocol puts children first”, commented Lord Filkin, the
minister with responsibility for the Family Justice System. “It
aims to speed up court cases so that children have the certainty they
need about their future as soon as possible. All agencies, including
social services, Cafcass [Children and Family Court Advisory and Support
Service] and the courts will have to come together to make this work”.
There are around
20,000 public law care applications each year, and last year the average
length for such a case was 48 weeks. The protocol was published in June
this year and, since then, staff have been recruited and IT put in place
to assist the changes. There have been 2,000 additional sitting days
allocated to county courts in England and Wales in 2003 to cope with
the increasing number of public law care applications.
In particular,
the protocol aims to: reduce delay by the early narrowing down of issues;
encourage a proactive and cooperative approach to case management among
judges and lawyers; reduce the number of directions hearings; use experts
in a more focussed manner; and reduce the length of final hearings.
David Burrows,
chairman of the Solicitors Family Law Association (SFLA), recently raised
“four cheers” to the aim of the protocol. But he was “sceptical”
of the use of the word ‘protocol’. “Excellent though
the ideas are in this protocol, it seemed to me, at first reading, that
it was merely making rule changes by the back door”, he argued
in a recent SFLA review.
But Burrows
said the protocol reflected a realisation by the president of the Family
Court, Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, and other judges of the Family Court,
that rule changes of such a scale take time, but that “something
desperately needs to be done to control delay in children proceedings”.
There was a
proposed new system “carefully and painstakingly worked out by
a variety of agencies, including the SFLA”, said Burrows. “[The
protocol] achieves the necessary end, whatever the technical procedural
means. It deserves to work. For the sake of so many children, whose
lives are suspended while the court process grinds on, it must work.”
