On the Brink of Collapse? The Family Law System in 2021
Published in Counsel — The Magazine of the Bar of England and Wales, 23 September 2021.
The family law system is in crisis and a failure to recognise it as such demeans the Herculean efforts of all involved — so I wrote in Counsel Magazine in September 2021, as an exhausted family practitioner who had returned to practice after eight years overseas, only to find a system under extraordinary strain.
The COVID-19 pandemic had compressed years of accumulated pressure into months. Backlogs were chronic. The 26-week timescale for care proceedings — already a fiction in many courts — had become aspirational at best. Legal aid had been decimated. And yet the cases kept arriving, each one representing a family in crisis, a child in need.
It is not enough to praise the dedication of those working within the system — though their dedication is extraordinary and genuine. We also have a duty to speak honestly about whether the system they are working within is fit for purpose. I believe it is not, and that saying so is not a counsel of despair but the beginning of the honest reckoning that meaningful reform requires.