Lets hear it for the child; Restoring the Authority of the Family Court, Blue skies and Sacred cows

A 23 % cut in the Ministry of Justice Budget has now been announced though the detail remains largely hidden. Two weeks ago it was suggested that the axing of almost all public funding for private law disputes would be part of that cut. The implications of that (which cannot possibly yet have been properly considered) are at this stage impossible to predict. The law of unintended consequences make it quite impossible to do so. It may not all be bad. Less money to fight your ex partner may lead to less dispute and so ease the burden on us all. Overall will children suffer more or less? Frankly who knows? Some certainly will. And there can be no doubt that these changes will produce a greatly increased demand for your services. Whether that demand will be satisfied however is much more problematic.

We are of course assured, and have over the years always been assured, that there will be no cut to front line services. Even if that was true, which it never has been and isn’t in reality, merely standing still would create huge extra pressure by dint of the steady increase in the volumes and the increased complexity of the work.

Of course, the major cause for the increase in the work is the huge increase in the scale of family breakdown within both married and unmarried communities from all sections of society and all ethnic groups with the concomitant children related issues. But I am not going to discuss family breakdown this morning. I have done that on numerous occasions in the past few years, both in Britain and abroad. It has provoked strong and mixed reactions although broadly and mostly favourable. But everyone is fiercely defensive of his or her own chosen mode of life. Objective evaluation is, at best, at a premium in these debates. Family breakdown is a vastly complex problem which confronts all of the western world and it has to be addressed by both individuals, private funded or charitable organisations and to an extent governments. That is for another time. But the fact is; primarily the family courts have to pick up the pieces of these fractured societies and the damaged children which they spawn and the question is how do we manage the ever increasing flood?