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Published: Thursday, 03 December 2020 15:51

Today's Times reports on Families Need Fathers proposals for an Early Intervention Pathway with urgent hearings to resolve contested allegations of domestic abuse.

The Times said - "A spokesman for Families Need Fathers says many divorcing parents are “operating in the blind” and need help to understand what a good separation could look like. Where there are no allegations of domestic abuse, he suggests the introduction of an “early intervention pathway” to help couples to achieve amicable solutions. The lack of legal aid, he says, has caused a “rocketing” in the number of allegations of abuse. He tells The Times: “We have no doubt that people invent allegations to get legal aid.” Where allegations are made, he suggests that legal aid should be provided to both parties, with hearing listed within two weeks to determine the facts, and if they are false, legal aid should be removed. More widely, he proposes that legal aid should be given to enable the children involved to be represented so the court can focus on them instead of the battling parents."

The article outlines how Family Court applications are at an all-time high and how Sir Andrew McFarlane, the President of the Family Division wared (at our conference on 21st November 2020) about some 40% of cases asking judges to determine children issues and how most cases, without allegations of domestic, should not rely on courts being a "first port of call" and rather be a "last resort". We agree with Sir Andrew. However, the conditions need to be right. A further example (in addition to the ones in the article) is that mediation is means-tested for children matters, but free for financial disputes up to £10k. Priorities are wrong. The Ministry of Justice said in response "there is no evidence of people making up domestic abuse allegations to access legal aid". The statement may well be technically accurate, but the reason is that they do not collect data on proceedings or findings of family courts.

Domestic abuse allegations are now the basis of grant of legal aid in a quarter of all private family proceedings, up from under 10% before changes in rules. Members of the judiciary confirm the pattern to us as to thousands of our service users. As well as education and early intervention, there is a need too for a strategy for separated families - so child maintenance, child benefits, family justice, schools, etc all work to support co-parenting.

Currently policies undermine this by not incentivising or discouraging bad parenting. More often they do exactly the opposite.

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