Parents: Separation

Lord Roborough Excerpts

Monday 22nd April 2024 Lords Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord Bellamy) (Con)]

My Lords, few subjects can be more important than the one we are discussing this evening, and I rather doubt my ability to do justice to everything that has been said in the 12 minutes allotted to me. I thank my noble friend Lord Farmer for his opening remarks and for securing this debate, and all noble Lords who have spoken. I think we are all agreed that family separation can be extremely stressful and very damaging to the children, particularly if there is a prolonged period of lack of contact, as my noble friend Lady Meyer pointed out. In those circumstances, the Government are actively supporting, and improving support, for parents considering separation, and are adopting a number of measures to promote early resolutions.

The best approach is probably if I update the House on what we are actually doing, following our response published on 26 January to our earlier consultation on early resolution of family disputes. What the Ministry of Justice is doing, of course, is in addition to other work across government, including the rollout of family hubs. Again, I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Farmer in this respect. Family hubs are led by the Department for Education. There is also funding from the Department for Work and Pensions for local authorities to deliver the Reducing Parental Conflict programme.

The House will have heard in the recent Budget that the Ministry of Justice has been awarded a further investment of £55 million, specifically for the family courts. That comes, basically, in three buckets—if I may say so. The first is one that a number of noble Lords, including the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, have mentioned. I pay tribute to her, not only for her distinguished past as a former chair of Cafcass and in other respects, but for the post-legislative scrutiny carried out in relation to the 2014 Act, from which we have all greatly profited. However, the three buckets are, first, greatly improved, facilitated, targeted online guidance and information, so parents know where to go and can find out, at a very early stage, all the sources of support out there. There are quite a lot of sources of support, but no one can find them or knows about them—they are not joined up. The first part of the funding will be for a new online resource that will serve as a trusted and accessible source of authoritative information, relevant to the needs of the family and the needs of the parents, providing options—which will include mediation, but not only that because there are other forms of dispute resolution away from court—with the support of guidance and expert organisations in the third sector.

To deal specifically with one of the points raised by my noble friend Lord Farmer, I say that I am quite sure that links between this programme and the family hubs will be an important aspect of it—family hubs among other means of support. Indeed, if the present process for online divorce does not refer people across to the appropriate support facilities, then it should. That is another very important area, and I am very grateful to noble Lords for drawing our attention to it. Specifically, just as we have been discussing in another context a child-friendly version of the victims’ code, I would have thought that a child-friendly part of this newly available information was a specific emphasis on how we keep children informed, not only about what is happening in their case, but the general availability of support for them. As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby suggested, I am sure that would also be important.

I am hoping that this will be a major step forward in how we intervene as early as we can in family disputes, combining it, as I say, with the DWP’s Reducing Parental Conflict programme, the family hubs and other programmes that a number of local authorities are already running to support separating couples—or, indeed, couples who have not yet separated but who are going through a difficult patch, which is to go back to an even earlier stage.

We are championing the family hubs that the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, has been such a keen advocate of. There is around £300 million to develop family hubs in 75 upper-tier local authorities. There are now around 400 family hubs altogether, and there is further support for opening further family hubs in another 13 local authorities. That is an ongoing programme, and I hope that it will come to full fruition, in collaboration with the kinds of things that I am trying to explain from the point of view of the Ministry of Justice.

In addition, the second bucket of our new funding is indeed to tackle this point about early legal advice, which is so important and was raised by the post-legislative scrutiny committee and a number of others. What we are doing is piloting; government being what it is, you have to pilot these things these days—you cannot go straight towards just doing it. It is important to learn from the pilot how to do things. I shall come back to that point in the pathfinder context.

The purpose at the moment is to expand, with the additional money that we now have, a pilot for early family legal advice, probably initially in six areas. As noble Lords probably remember, we have 43 areas across the country that have a designated family judge in charge. We can now go to six areas initially; the details are being worked out, but I am hoping that this will be up and running by the autumn. By September we should have something in place. It will be very important, among other things, to promote it and make sure that people know that it is there and that they can access it easily. We had a pilot in the ministry a couple of years ago with support in family housing, which did not work because nobody knew that it was there so nobody used it. It was in Middlesbrough, and possibly Manchester, but it was not successful, so I am very conscious that we have to sell this as well as establish it, and those details are being worked through at the moment.

That is early legal advice. Then there is the diversion when people have had early legal advice, which may lead to more referrals to mediation, or other forms of court dispute resolution. We are continuing to support the voucher scheme for mediation; that demand has been strong, with 27,000 families so far, and has cost £23 million or so. By March 2025, we think that 44,000 families will have used the scheme, so that will continue to support mediation—and, at the same time, we are working closely with the Family Procedure Rule Committee to make the mediation information and assessment meeting, which has been mentioned, more effective. The new rules come into force on 29 April, next Monday. I hope that that will prevent MIAM from being, as it had become in some areas, a tick-box exercise.

Ah, the lights have gone out; I must have said something very controversial. I still have enough light to carry on.

That provision is proceeding, as are pathfinder courts. We of course support Cafcass, but those courts focus on the voice of the child. We have an early child impact report, we have support from domestic abuse agencies, we have a case progression officer and we have other things. It has been notably successful in reducing strife and the Government’s intention now is no longer a pilot, it is a project, and we are going to roll it out across the country. We have done Dorset and north Wales, we are doing Birmingham and Cardiff, but I am pressing very hard for a plan so that we change it across the whole country over the next year or so. My Whip is telling me to sit down, although I am trying enthusiastically to carry on. I will write to those noble Lords whose questions I have not been able to answer in the very limited time I have.

The President of the Family Division describes the pathfinder as the most important change in private family law that we have had for a generation, and that is going to be a very good thing and the right note to end on.

[Lord Roborough (Con)]

My Lords, we will now adjourn again to wait for a message on the Rwanda Bill. We will resume at a time to be shown on the Annunciator.