Sir James Munby - FNF 2014 Conference Speech
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- Published: Thursday, 20 November 2014 16:09
Sir James Munby, President of the Family Division
Keynote speech at Families Need Fathers Conference 16th November 2014
It’s a great privilege and honour to me to be invited to come and speak to you this morning. I think it’s one of the most important parts of my responsibility as President of the Family Division to get out and meet as many people as possible who are tied up – often typically unwillingly – in the family justice system.
It enables me to do my job better if I can hear directly what people have to say. It is also very important that as many people as possible should have the opportunity of seeing and hearing in the flesh as it were, the person who for good or ill has been put in charge of the system.
It is a particular privilege if I may say so to be here on your 40th anniversary. You as an organisation have been doing invaluable work for far too many years. The fact that there is still so much to be done is no criticism of you but is, if anything, a commentary on the system. All I can say is keep up the good work. We all have a very long way to go.
You will not, I hope, accuse me of complacency. I tend to speak my mind. And down the years and long before I became President I have spoken my mind in judgements which have reverberated at the time. It saddens me considerably that it is over 10 years now that I gave a judgement on the 1st of April 2004 which was critical and was thought at the time to be strikingly critical coming from a judge about the deficiencies of the private law system.
I recently reread that judgement. There is not a word in that judgement which I have resiled from. The diagnosis of the problems seems to be as accurate now as it was then. And in very large measure the necessary remedies are as I suggested in that judgement. It was as I observed earlier this year that almost ten years after I gave that judgement Lord Justice McFarlane had occasion to condemn in a court of appeal case towards the end of last year in the strongest possible language private law proceedings that had gone on for 12 years or so and had become an exercise - taking a phrase I had used ten years ago - in complete futility.
I said publicly as President earlier this year that we had come so far but in a sense so little distance.
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