Family Courts: Legal Representation

(asked on 23rd March 2023) - View Source

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of (a) trends in the level of legal representation in the family courts since the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 came into force and (b) trends on the timeliness of cases from commencement to disposal (c) the impact of lower levels of legal representation on the (i) timeliness of cases and (ii) court backlog.


Answered by
Mike Freer Portrait
Mike Freer
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Ministry of Justice)
This question was answered on 28th March 2023

Information on legal representation (including the number of Litigants in Person) is published in Family Courts Statistics Quarterly with further information on legal representation status of applicants and respondents by case type:
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/family-court-statistics-quarterly-july-to-september-2022.

Information on the number of disposals and average time to first definitive disposal, broken down by parties with legal representation and case type is routinely published by the Ministry of Justice and can be found via Family Court Statistics Quarterly:
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/family-court-statistics-quarterly-july-to-september-2022.

The Review of Civil Legal Aid will consider the civil legal aid system in its entirety; from how services are procured, how well the current system works for users and how civil legal aid impacts the wider justice system.

Whilst the Review is not looking specifically at addressing delays in the family courts, more widely we are maximising sitting days to work through the outstanding caseload. In the family court, we sat to our highest ever level in 2021 – just under 56,000 days in public law and just under 83,000 days in private law. This is 2% higher than our sitting day levels in 2020 for public law and 16% higher than our sitting days in 2020 for private law.

We have significantly increased funding to improve waiting times in the family courts. This includes increasing funding to the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service (Cafcass) by £8.4 million this financial year to deal with more open active cases.

We are modernising our systems through the HMCTS Reform programme to improve efficiency by removing unnecessary forms and duplication.

We have made greater use of fee-paid and part-time judges by lifting the number of days that fee-paid judges can sit.

We have also made provisions to ensure that fee-paid judiciary from elsewhere in England and Wales can now hear suitable cases remotely, to increase the judicial resource available to hear cases from London and the South East and reduce delays in those regions.

Legal aid is available in certain family matters, such as public family law cases which fall under the Children Act 1989. These types of cases include proceedings relating to whether a child should be taken into care or who should have parental responsibility or contact.

In March 2022, we published a detailed consultation on legal aid means-testing arrangements. The consultation proposed a broad suite of changes to the civil and criminal legal aid means test, with the aim of ensuring access to justice.

The Department for Education is working with the Public Law Working Group sub-group on care proceedings reform to bring learning from Family Drug and Alcohol Courts and other problem-solving approaches into public law proceedings, to make proceedings less adversarial and improve parents’ engagement in the process.

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