MS KATHERINE GIEVE, MR PETER WATSON-LEE AND MS CHRISTINA BLACKLAWS

TUESDAY 29 APRIL 2003

  Chairman: Welcome, everyone. We are very delighted to have your help in this inquiry into CAFCASS. We have three separate sets of witnesses this morning, and at this session we have Katherine Gieve of the Solicitors' Family Law Association, and Peter Watson-Lee and Christina Blacklaws both from the Law Society. We look forward to hearing what you have to tell us. I think you have been told all the arrangements for correcting evidence, so can we start straight away with Mr Soley.

  90. First of all, I am trying to get an impression, if you like, of how the present service compares, both in quality and in coping with demand, with how it was before CAFCASS. I really want a gut feeling of whether it is better, worse, the same, or what?
  (Ms Blacklaws) Shall I deal with the Section 7 reports which is where the family court reporter is directed by the court to prepare a report? I think the feeling amongst practitioners and our experience is that things are equally as concerning now pre as post CAFCASS. Really there are some unacceptable delays in the preparation of these reports. The reports are taking between 12 and anything up to 50 weeks to be prepared in some very exceptional cases. Often papers are not received from the court due to administrative error; there are real concerns about staff resources and demand which lead to a great delay in allocation; and we have concerns about the quality of the work being done. The methodology is concerning. Often what is happening is that parents are being encouraged, if not forced, to be seen together by the family court reporter at the first instance. That is often found to be unhelpful by practitioners. The CAFCASS officers are only allowed to spend about twelve hours on each particular case. Our concerns are that the reports can be overgeneralistic, simplistic and often bereft of recommendations. The current perception about post CAFCASS is that things may have got slightly worse. I have a particular case which has taken twenty weeks for the family court reporter to prepare his report, and that was due to staff absences. The quality has not improved, and I think Peter can deal with outer London and what the situation is there.
  (Mr Watson-Lee) Christina practises in London but Bournemouth County Court is my local court in the provinces. Certainly the Law Society and all of us are very keen on the concept of CAFCASS and very positive about the setting up of it, but I cannot say I am afraid that there has been any noticeable improvement. Fortunately in Bournemouth, maybe because it is a pleasant place to work, we have retained many of the officers so we still have a number of the experienced officers but you can see it is a service under pressure. The officers have all got far too much work, they cannot give as much time as they would like, they are experienced officers and very dedicated but they are under a lot of pressure. The time for doing the reports has increased from 12-14 weeks, which is a lot better than in some other parts of the country so we are not the worst, but still that is three months which for a young child is a long time, and it is a couple of months before you get to the stage possibly of the report being ordered and there are some months afterwards, so even a good case can take six months from start to final hearing. As I say, I think we may be better off in Bournemouth than elsewhere.
  (Ms Gieve) If I could just deal with the public law position, I am a London practitioner and I am aware that the position in appointing public law children's guardians varies from area to area but in London the position is absolutely desperate from the point of view of children. There are somewhere between 150 and 200 unallocated cases. What that means in a public law care case is that, at the very early stage when the case is first before the court and when vital decisions are being made about the child's future and welfare, there is no independent welfare representative for the court. Now, it is true that the children have solicitors but of course the role of a solicitor is very different from the role of a children's guardian, and a solicitor is not in a position to make welfare recommendations to the court about what should happen to the child. The thing about public law cases is that quite often, not always but quite often, at the very start of the case, decisions can be made which can affect the whole future of the child's life. For example, you have a case where a child is born to a mother who has a history of mental health difficulties. The question is should that child remain with the mother in a mother and baby home in some sort of supported accommodation, or should the child be placed with foster carers? Now, what that child needs at the very beginning, not two or three months on, is someone who can look and make an independent judgment and advise the court independently about what is best for the child. This lack of children's guardians at the beginning of cases is really almost completely new—there were ups and downs in London but never waiting two or three months for a guardian to be appointed—and it is really a very dramatic change and a disastrous one. We are all aware that CAFCASS is doing its best but an enormous number of extremely experienced and sensible guardians were lost to the service in the transition and that has had very bad implications for the children we represent.

  91. Thank you. You have given quite a list of problems, especially you, Ms Blacklaws, which makes me feel I can ask you questions most of the morning, but I will not! What I would like to tease out though is that you all seem to be in favour, as I understand it, of CAFCASS generally and in principle but you are all saying the resources are too few and too stressed. Can we try and pinpoint a bit more where the actual problem is? Is it just the lack of officers or is it the lack of quality of training and quality of the appointed officer, because a lot of what you said indicates poor training or inappropriate appointment. I would particularly pick up on this issue of whether they make recommendations or not which might leave the court trying to decide what is best even though they might have appointed someone to give them a particular indication of what would be best.
  (Ms Blacklaws) I think certainly training and recruitment are two key issues for CAFCASS—

  92. We are going to come back at a later stage to the specific areas of training and recruitment.
  (Ms Blacklaws) Certainly with regard to the children and family court reporters, the people who came from the probation service effectively, there have always been some concerns from practitioners as to the quality of the report making and the work undertaking. Those people who undertake these reports are really rather hampered by the amount of time they are allowed to spend on it, so it is a bit of a circular argument. It is both those elements—the fact that there are not enough people, enough staff on the ground to undertake the work, and because of that they are not given the time to do it—but there are issues of training and quality that do need to be looked at as well.

  93. So the core of your complaint is the lack of resources in the sense of people, is that right?
  (Ms Blacklaws) Yes. Human and financial resources, I think.
  (Ms Gieve) In terms of the public law guardians there is a very specific complaint, and I do not know if it is too late to remedy it, which is having lost a large cadre of experienced people who are still there doing other things and, although I have read in some of the papers that they may be getting older, nonetheless quite a lot of them have got quite a lot of years' service left and I think it would be helpful if efforts could be made to woo some of those back by recognising their experience and independence. That would be a really useful task. Several hundred people have been lost to the service, and if you suddenly lose a large number like that you are bound to be in difficulties.

  94. On the question of quality of management, how much of this is a failure of management as opposed to resources?
  (Ms Gieve) I think there clearly were enormous difficulties in the setting up of CAFCASS. CAFCASS in our view went in several wrong directions and that led to enormous problems, so quite a lot of the problem seems to be historic. The other thing is that perhaps a lack of appreciation in CAFCASS of the importance of having independent and experienced people. What you are looking for in a good guardian as in many other fields is someone who can make good and confident judgments, and however good your management is the calibre of the people is enormously important.

  95. Management is affected, is it not? I think you mentioned a case of waiting fifty weeks. Is there no management check on how long it takes before a case gets back to court with a report?
  (Ms Blacklaws) I think the perception is the management structure is fairly embryonic at this stage. With public law guardians there are quite a lot of private law practitioners who are effectively managing them so there is a dearth of experience there as well.

  96. So apart from the court saying "We have not got this report back yet", there is no one within the organisation that you are aware of who is checking to see whether a report gets back in a good time?
  (Ms Blacklaws) Certainly in London, London CAFCASS operate a duty manager scheme that is available every single day for lawyer practitioners or, indeed, CAFCASS officers to make inquiries but obviously there is a limit to what that one person can do and it is effectively information-giving rather than much else.

  97. So it does not work in terms of necessarily delivering a more effective system?
  (Ms Blacklaws) No. The other point to make is that pre CAFCASS, obviously particularly in the public law sphere, what we had was more experienced guardians, less delay, and a service that was operated with very minimal management structure. There were two or three managers in London.

  98. Could I check whether the general problems you have described are, in your opinions, also affecting CAFCASS Legal with the work that the Official Solicitor used to do?
  (Ms Gieve) There is a lot of pressure on CAFCASS Legal. There are some extremely good people there. We have discussed this and each of us has very limited experience of CAFCASS Legal. There is anecdotal experience that CAFCASS Legal is not able to take on the number of cases that the Official Solicitor used to take on but I am not sure that really we are in a good position to help on this.
  (Mr Watson-Lee) We discussed this yesterday between us. My experience is that two or three times from our office we have referred matters to CAFCASS Legal and they have never been able to take them on. These are cases where we are asking CAFCASS Legal to represent a child in a private law case and they have never had the facility to take them on. We do not know quite the size of CAFCASS Legal but we think it is very small and has not got the capacity to take on legal cases.
  (Ms Gieve) I understand CAFCASS Legal now does have a system of referring out cases to local officers and child's guardians. I think one of the problems here is that the importance of the representation of children in private law proceedings is being more recognised, and whereas CAFCASS Legal in the Official Solicitor's office was generally limited to very unusual cases, there is now—and maybe this is something which you will wish to talk about later—a perception that it is very useful for children in some difficult cases between parents, not perhaps the extraordinary medical treatment cases but just, as it were, ordinary difficult breakdown of marriage cases where in fact the parents have lost sight of the needs of the child, to have independent representation for children. So I think there is an increased demand really as well as being problems of supply.

  99. The Minister in the House argued precisely that case but do you think the resource implications of what she was saying were really considered at all at that stage?
  (Ms Gieve) I think there was a lot of support and I think people were very grateful to the Minister for recognising and taking on needs of that group of children, but obviously it does need resources if it is going to be honoured. The other point is that the right of a child to be heard is something which we have much more prominently in our minds, quite rightly, than we did in the past.
  (Ms Blacklaws) The point is that the resources are there as far as the solicitors are concerned. There are over 2000 members of the Law Society Children Panel. It is the resources for the CAFCASS officers, the children's guardians, which is of concern particularly in London but other parts of the country as well.