Family Court Delays See Children Waiting Almost a Year to Finalise Living Arrangements
The latest data published by the Ministry of Justice shows that children involved in private law cases are now waiting on average 47 weeks – almost a year – to find out who they will be living with long term.
This continues an upward trend seen since the middle of 2016, where the number of new cases overtook the number of closed cases.
A year is an extraordinarily long time for children, and their parents, to be in adversarial court proceedings which research has shown impose huge stress on the families involved.
But what do these statistics really mean? Well, in the first quarter of 2023, 13,000 new applications were made, involving 20,575 individual children whose lives are being affected by this delay. So 20,575 children are right now waiting almost a year for crucial questions to be answered, such as ‘where will I be living?’, ‘how often will I see each of my parents?’, or ‘where will I spend the summer holidays?’.
The statistics reinforce the need for an overhaul of the Family Justice System, so that cases are triaged at the earliest stage, diverting those families who don’t require adversarial court proceedings to access other services such as mediation, co-parenting expertise, arbitration or One Couple One Lawyer services like ours.
Our Living Apart Parenting Together programme gets families to shared legal advice within 3-4 weeks, can be child-inclusive and includes support from co-parenting experts if that would help, enabling families, at the earliest stage to reach an outcome which works and to move on.
Author Name: Editor
Published content by The Divorce Surgery Editorial Team.
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