King’s Speech

Lord Bellamy Excerpts

Wednesday 24th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bellamy (Con)]

My Lords, I warmly welcome the Minister and congratulate him on a most outstanding maiden speech. I will briefly deal with two topics not mentioned in His Majesty’s gracious Speech: family justice and the efficiency of our courts.

Such is the pressure on the prisons and on our court system that family justice struggles very often to get attention. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, whom I also warmly welcome and congratulate on his appointment, is a distinguished family magistrate, but I first ask the Minister for an assurance that the family justice system will receive both the attention and the resources it needs under the new Government.

More particularly, the previous Government quietly embarked on an ambitious programme to improve family justice, including setting new objectives through the Family Justice Board; reinvigorating the local family justice boards; rolling out the pathfinder project in private family law across the country, which transforms the old adversarial system into a problem-solving system; instituting a pilot scheme for early legal advice, because in family law many litigants are unrepresented; encouraging mediation; and taking other measures. Will the Minister kindly assure the House that this programme will continue, that in particular the rollout of the pathfinder project across the country will be taken forward and that the Lord Chancellor will not take no for an answer, whatever the alleged lack of financial resources or other feeble excuses might be put forward? Our children deserve no less.

Similarly, and in the same vein, will the Minister consider closely reforming the adversarial system that exists in public family law to encourage a more conciliatory and cost-effective approach, including earlier resolution? Will the Minister particularly investigate why the cost of family law proceedings is so high and has risen so sharply, and why, in particular, some 13,000 or so cases in public family law consume about half the whole civil legal aid budget and cost almost as much as legal aid in the entire Crown Court?

I turn briefly to court administration. The general public, and indeed noble Lords, may not know or entirely appreciate that each year there is an extremely painful negotiation between the Government and judges as to how many days courts are allowed to sit, with a view to restricting the latter. Much emphasis has already been put on the appalling delays in our court system. Faced as we are with that, does the Minister agree that any system intended to restrict court sittings should be fully transparent and explained, and that the rationale for this system and the decisions made thereunder should be explained fully to Parliament and the general public?

Still on the subject of court administration, this is largely in the hands of His Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service, HMCTS. Serious questions arise about the transparency and accountability of the present framework under which that system operates. Those questions are for another day, but the final question I would like to ask the Minister is this: is he aware that in our country which, as the Attorney-General emphasised yesterday, prides itself on the rule of law, our dedicated and hard-working court staff are the worst-paid public servants? Apart from anything else, that seriously undermines the efficiency of our entire court system. What do the Government propose to do about it?