Improving Access To Justice Report
JUSTICE, the all-party law reform and human rights organisation, has published a report setting out ambitious but realistic recommendations which seek to improve access to justice for separating families who are trying to resolve the arrangements for their children.
It is a compelling report, well worth a read, and highlights the real and systemic problems with our Family Justice System:
“For … families, affordable and trustworthy legal advice is scarce, while the court process can be slow, alienating, adversarial, and lacking in coordination with other support services. For the children at the centre of the dispute, the process can too often leave them unheard and unsupported, feeling like the object of an adult dispute rather than an individual with their own perspective about their past and their future.”
The report endorses three key principles:
- The rule of law requires access to forms of dispute resolution – including access to the court system
- The family justice system must be designed around the needs of families, not the expertise of legal professionals; and
- The child’s perspective must be at the heart of every stage of dispute resolution in the family justice system.
The Working Party recommends the creation of a single authoritative online information platform for families going through separation. This should feature both legal and non-legal information to help families understand their problems and solutions holistically, and provide assistance to those out of court as well as those in proceedings or leaving court.
The report identifies the significant benefits of access to early legal advice: the opportunity to correct wholly unrealistic expectations of what courts can do, assess and discuss non-court options, provide potential litigants with a basic legal understanding of their rights and obligations as well as their legal aid entitlements, and ensure those who need the court can do so efficiently and safely. They recommend that publicly funded early legal advice on child arrangements should be piloted without delay.
This also requires better funding for non-court resolution options, including packages of support featuring legal and non-legal help, for example counselling, legal help, and mediation. A ‘mediate or litigate’ binary choice for families is unhelpful, given the benefits of different dispute resolution processes for different families.
The report considers that radical change is required to ensure the family court delivers the service that families need from it. This requires a collaborative problem-solving approach to private child disputes, in which the role of the court is relieve rather than inflame the emotional intensity of the dispute and help the family find safe and sustainable solutions, including non-legal support with the underlying and co-existing problems the family are experiencing.
One Couple One Lawyer
The report specifically identifies The Divorce Surgery, and the One Couple One Lawyer model we have pioneered, as an example of a non-court innovation which should be made financially accessible to more families, for example by extending the mediation voucher scheme or another form of financial support.
This report is required reading for anyone interested in the future of Family Justice. Its findings very much chime with our experience: that empowering separating families with early legal advice and a solutions focussed approach can result in good outcomes. There is no panacea, and separating families need information about all their options so they can choose what works best for them. We hope this report drives systemic change, and gets the attention it deserves.
You can read the full report here: JUSTICE-Improving-Access-to-Justice-for-Separating-Families-October-2022.pdf
And the press release here: JUSTICE-Press-Release-Improving-Access-to-Justice-for-Separating-Families-2022.pdf
Author Name: Editor
Published content by The Divorce Surgery Editorial Team.
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