Family Proceedings

(asked on 14th September 2020) - View Source

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many and what proportion of (a) private and (b) public proceedings in family courts have been attended in person by parties litigant in each of the last ten years.


Answered by
Alex Chalk Portrait
Alex Chalk
Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice
This question was answered on 22nd September 2020

While a party to private or public law court proceedings may not be legally represented, they may have previously received legal advice.

The Department does not collect information on litigants in person in the family courts. This information could only be obtained from analysis of individual case files at disproportionate cost.

However, an indication of self-representation in family cases is identified in the case management systems used by Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service by the legal representation field being left blank. By focusing on cases with at least one hearing, the parties with no legal representative recorded give an approximation to the information requested. This is provided in the attached table which covers the year 2011 to 2019.

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