Welcome to the Public Accounts Committee on Monday 23 June 2025. Family justice is concerned with keeping children safe and helping families to resolve disputes. These cases aim to protect children, deciding on who children live with and how they spend their time with their family, as well as making decisions on divorce, adoption and associated financial arrangements. While the backlog in the family courts has reduced since 2021, family justice cases still take far too long. The target of 26 weeks to resolve most care proceedings instigated by local authorities has never been met, and these delays can mean increased risk of harm to families and children. There are over 4,000 children involved in cases taking more than 100 weeks, as at last December. No single body is accountable for the performance of family justice and the dispersal of responsibilities has led to a lack of shared understanding of what good-quality support looks like from the perspective of the child. In today’s session, we will be examining the performance of family justice system services for children, particularly the causes and impact of delays on outcomes for children, and the effectiveness of initiatives that Government are taking to improve services. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank all the people who have submitted evidence to this inquiry. Although we have been unable to publish all of it, it has been very useful to the Committee and has informed our questioning today. We cannot, of course, take up personal cases, but much of our evidence was deeply personal and we appreciated receiving it and being able to read it. Without any further ado, I would like to introduce our witnesses. Thank you very much. We have Amy Rees, the interim Permanent Secretary. Amy has been in the role since February 2025, having previously been chief executive of HMPPS. You seem to have moved out of the fire into the frying pan. We have Luke Taylor with us, deputy director of family justice system improvement. Luke joined the MOJ in his role in January 2019, having worked as a director of the Equality and Human Rights Commission. From His Majesty’s Courts and Tribunal Service, HMCTS, we have Nick Goodwin, chief executive. Nick was appointed chief executive in March 2022, having been previously chief executive and public guardian in the Office of the Public Guardian. From the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service, CAFCASS, we have Jacky Tiotto, chief executive. Jacky has been in the role since September 2019 and was previously director of children’s services at the London Borough of Bexley. From the Department for Education, we have Fran Oram, former director of children’s social care strategy and care system. Fran has been in the role since 2019, and has been in previous roles throughout DFE, including workforce and practice and reforming children’s social care services. She has moved to MHCLG and is now in charge of local government reform. You have another big job. We want to particularly warmly welcome today the three who, I think, have probably not been here before. Luke, it is your first time. Fran, it is your first time. Jacky, it is your first time. All three of you are particularly welcome, and thank you for coming to the Committee today. We have two questions at the top. We first call on Sarah Hall to talk about actions in response to the legal aid cyber-attack. We have had a briefing on this, of course.

The first thing we want to say is that we recognise that this has caused disruption, particularly to the providers that deal with legal aid. It is a vital part of our justice system, so we are genuinely grateful for the way they have worked with us. As you said, we experienced what we first perceived to be suspicious activity, but we did not quite understand the extent of it. The more we investigated it, we realised that it had potentially been quite a significant breach. The action we have taken since then is that we obviously took the system offline so that no further damage or potential contagion, if you like, could be caused anywhere else. Then we have built back up the systems. We are using alternative practices now in order to make sure that we can still deliver the services, in both civil and crime.

There are a couple of things. For example, on the civil side, we are using an average payment system. We look at what has been submitted before and use an average payment system to ensure that that civil process can still be made. On criminal, we have both new applications and the current system back up and running in terms of making payments to providers. We do not yet have the full service functionality of the original IT system back. We are using alternative practices, like I say—paper, manual methods and using averages. We are keeping justice systems running, but we are not using the IT system, which, unfortunately for staff in the legal aid service and providers, means a bit more work than they would normally do to get us back to the same point, for which we are very grateful.

These are legacy systems. The Government had already allocated £20 million to improve these services. We now have to work out—and we have not yet worked out exactly how to do this—whether we want to fix and remediate old systems, or whether we go to the new systems we were planning on investing in anyway. The truth is that probably it will be a combination of them both. In terms of the attack itself, without going into too much detail in a public forum, not all of the systems that make up the legal aid system were attacked at the same level and in the same way. Some systems we have even been able to bring back up online already. There are others that were a lot more deeply penetrated, and so we are much more nervous about bringing those back up online. Over the next six to eight weeks, we will seek to work out rapidly whether we can remediate them and bring them back online, and then they will be updated later to get off legacy systems, or whether, in some parts of those, we will bypass it and not remediate the legacy systems, but go straight to new systems. That is why we are working on the contingency processes, to buy ourselves time to do that work properly to bring the systems back up online.

It is still offline now but, to be clear, the attackers never took the system offline. We took the system offline because we were worried that there was activity and we would not know what would be going on.

It is a really good question on lots of levels about what lessons we have learnt, in all seriousness. Just at the legal aid level, we have learnt a lot about both the processes and the contingencies that we are running now and how we might want to bring back up new systems, to your question. We have been running slightly different processes. We have learned a lot about how we might do that. We have also learned, more broadly, about the vulnerabilities that exist more broadly than just legal aid, right across Government systems, how our contingencies work in response to those and making sure that we have contingency plans to continue to run the service. There is a lot of learning that we can take from this. As I say, I am very grateful to the teams and providers that have worked with us so brilliantly to keep services running.

As I say, we have done really well at keeping services running. The impact, though, is that it has probably taken longer to get some legal aid claims through than it otherwise would have done. Also, for everyone involved, it has probably meant more onerous paperwork than the systems that they are used to. It should not have meant that anyone did not receive the system or the output that they should have.

It is bound to have put a bit of extra pressure on the entire system, because, as I have said, it has taken longer. It is much too early for us to see any of that come through in any significant way.

That is a very helpful exchange; I am sorry, Sarah, to cut you off, but we have so much to cover today. Can we keep in touch with you, Permanent Secretary, and see how you are implementing this? We may well correspond or come back to it at a later stage. Very quickly, the Committee paid great deal of attention to Sir Brian Leveson’s review of the delays in the Crown courts. Can you give us a very brief update on that, when you expect to receive it and when you expect to be able to start implementing it?

The very brief update is that, like you, we are very much looking forward to the report. We expect to publish the report in the next two to three weeks, and the Government will then make their response.

That was an admirably short answer, thank you. In view of the amount we have to go through today, we will write to you, please, if we may, on Treasury minutes on prison estate capacity. We have some questions there. Let us get on to the main hearing today, because there is an awful lot to cover. Q9                [1]Sarah Olney: Before I get into the main questions, since we are talking about family courts today, I want to highlight something that comes up over and over again in my constituency surgeries. People who are victims of domestic abuse find that their experience of the family court is very much perpetuating that abuse, for example permitting ongoing child contact with abusers, disregarding expert reports from CAFCASS or social services in which abuse is identified, the use of unregulated court experts and unregulated domestic abuse perpetrator programmes and permitting repeated and vexatious court cases. Obviously, we are diving into some very difficult and painful things here, and these are a lot of different individual cases. I would really appreciate a response from the MOJ about that range of different concerns that are being raised about family courts and, in particular, whether it is being used to perpetuate domestic abuse.

To the Chair’s point, I do not think that this answer will be admirably brief.

Shall we leave you to respond in writing on that? We may pick out various bits of it. To be honest, all those questions are too much to be answered in one question. Would you like to start on the main session?

Did you want me to give you just a couple of headlines? I am conscious that there are colleagues from other Departments who might want to come in, because some of this spans right across what you are asking. There are a couple of layers of answer to your question. First of all, we take domestic abuse extremely seriously, and you will hear us talk a lot today about the reforms that we have going on in both MOJ and DFE, particularly Pathfinder, which will become something I am sure we talk about a lot. The whole aim was to improve the experience for those who are victims of domestic abuse. It is genuinely at the heart of the reform and what we are seeking to achieve. We have also done some very practical things. Some of that is about legislation and some legislation that we have taken, particularly in the 2021 Act, where we tried—to the very heart of your question—to clarify previous Acts to make it very clear that, if a judge or someone thinks that the court is going to be used to abuse someone, at the time of making the final order, they can prevent them from making any more applications unless the judge thinks it is genuine and in the interests. We have tried to prevent exactly what you are talking about, but we recognise that, at the heart of this, there is more to do. That is why Pathfinder has been rolling out a totally different approach, which includes independent advisers on domestic abuse and a much earlier engagement with the child. You mentioned specifics such as the child’s voice, trying to put children right at the heart from the very beginning and get more reports from social workers. I feel like your question is at the heart of this whole report. I do not know whether very quickly, Fran, you wanted to add anything.

I think that you have said it all, Amy. It is absolutely central.

Thank you for your admirably brief answer. We may come back to it as things occur.

Ms Rees, we are still seeing backlogs in the family court, although not as bad as it has been in other parts of the justice system. What do you think are the biggest factors contributing to the fact that we still have a large number of outstanding cases in the family courts?

We still have a large number and are obviously working very hard to get the backlog down. We have done well at reducing the backlog, as the NAO Report states on a number of occasions. There has been performance that has really sought to focus on the timeliness and trying to increase the timeliness right across public and private family law. We retain that laser-like focus. In terms of what drives the backlog in this, we think it is capacity, demand, case complexity and productivity. My colleagues would want to come in on all of those four, what we are doing and what we think the drivers are. Those are the things that we think create the issue. As you know, we have managed to bring down the total first to pre-pandemic levels, which has been extraordinarily hard work, and by over 20,000 cases in total. That is a really significant achievement, although we recognise there is more to do.

Mr Goodwin, why is it that the average length of time to resolve each case is still so high?

The average length of time has reduced. Over the last year we have seen private law and public law cases reduce by about three weeks, which is pretty good progress. That figure possibly undersells a little bit what has been achieved. As you are moving through the caseload, you are closing older cases. Those cases that might be 50, 60 or 70 weeks are closing and that is therefore bringing the mean up a bit more. The underlying reduction in case volumes that the Permanent Secretary has spoken about has driven a better underlying improvement in case duration. In public law, case duration is still above 26 weeks on average. Some areas hit 26 weeks, but, from memory, in public law we are down to around about 34 or 35 weeks. Previously, it was more like 37 or 38. In private law, we are down to about 39 weeks or 42 weeks at national level. There are big regional variations in that. For example, in Wales there has always been really good performance in both public and private law. It is within the statutory time periods for public law and good performance on private law, supported by the Pathfinder pilot that has been particularly active in Wales and now rolled out across Wales. Elsewhere, it is more difficult. Amy referred to some of the constraints. We are seeing really good attempts to recover in London and the south-east, but it is more difficult in London and the south-east. That is driven by a number of the things. Capacity is difficult in the south-east. When we think about the capacity constraints that we have within HMCTS, we are not talking about buildings. We are principally talking about the judiciary. There have been a lot more judges now available to hear cases than before—since around pre-pandemic, there are about 600 more judges ready to hear family cases—but there is a shortage in London and the south-east of district judges to hear family cases. We are doing quite a lot to tackle that. We hope that that will turn around. That is a broad picture.

Mr Goodwin, yes, they are certainly well down from the peak in 2021 of 65,743 cases, but it was still at 47,662 in December 2024 and there were still over 4,000 children waiting over 100 weeks to have their cases dealt with. Particularly that latter statistic must weigh very heavily on those children. I am sure that they are very difficult, complex cases, but what priority can be given to trying to resolve some of those more quickly?

I will hand over to Luke in a moment on this. We have made quite a lot of progress with those very old cases, the 100-week and 90-week-plus cases. That was a priority of the Family Justice Board. The president of the family division has been encouraging his judges to list and blitz those cases, and they have come down pretty quickly. In both public and private law, we have seen the number of really old cases come down by about 40%, but that is a cross-agency effort. For that reason, Luke might want to say a bit more on what has been going on there.

I am happy to add to what Nick said. The focus on reducing the 100-week-plus cases in public law and private law was an explicit target agreed by the Family Justice Board in 2024-25, and it is mentioned in the NAO Report. To update the progress that was made as of the end of March, as Nick has alluded to, in relation to public law cases over 100 weeks, we had reduced that number by 48%. Admittedly, we had not reduced them to zero, but we had reduced that measure by 48%. On private law, we had reduced that by 46% by the end of March 2025. We recognise that there is more to do. In setting targets for the system for 2025-26, we are retaining a focus on long-running public law cases. We are actually ratcheting up that target to aim at all cases over 90 weeks in duration. We are still retaining a focus on 100-week-plus cases in private law, so it is very much in the forefront of our minds. When we set those targets at the Family Justice Board, that is informed by what children have been telling us, through the Family Justice Young People’s Board, about the impact that delay has for them. That understanding of delay and what it means for children in the longest-running proceedings is part of how we have been trying to respond over the last two years.

That is very helpful. Thank you very much.

I am sure that MOJ and HMCTS colleagues will come in on the specific measurements, because they are court measurements, so my colleagues on the panel have a bit more on that. I am very happy to talk a bit about some of the demand measures that DFE have been leading and some of the productivity measures that we have been driving. Which order would you prefer we take them in?

Let us get it on the record.

We can go on the data first and then I can add a bit.

We look at it really closely, as we do all key performance figures in HMCTS. What does that mean? That means that we are always looking at how we are performing against the 26 weeks and other measures, regionally, nationally and, in fact, sub-regionally, throughout our entire governance structure. In HMCTS, that means that we have a performance committee that looks at this. We look at it at my level, the executive committee level. The HMCTS board looks at it every month. Indeed, we have invited the president of the family division and others to come and look at it. Collectively with the judiciary, we look at this in our family service boards and family business authority, so it gets a lot of scrutiny. It gets a lot of scrutiny on reasons, causes and what we can do to improve things, not just what the overlying figure is. That informs how we allocate resources. When we divvy up the amount of resource and the amount of activity we can have in each region, it is informed by how each region is performing on both public and private law. That drives quite a lot of decision making, to try to reduce any element of localism. I am also challenged on this outside of HMCTS and outside of the judiciary. Amy, through the MOJ departmental board and so forth, is also challenging us on these statistics. Beyond that, I am sure that Luke will tell you that the Family Justice Board is also pretty hot on it, so it gets a lot of scrutiny.

It is getting better now. We are seeing improvements back towards 26 weeks, which we were last at quite a long time pre-pandemic. The problem with this is that these are not levers that you pull and get immediate effect. You are talking about capacity. I have spoken about judicial capacity. To get a judge, you have to get someone through training and then you have to get them recruited. My legal advisers are another key constraint; I have to recruit and train them. Of course, there are constraints with social work. That is just capacity alone. You do not just turn on the tap and it flows. It needs a bit more planning and consideration for that, which is why you need to be fairly hot on it.

Indeed, but pre-pandemic performance was pretty good. The pandemic was very difficult for the entirety of the justice system. In the family courts, we managed to make great use of virtual hearings. In fact, we pumped a lot of resource into those courts at that point in time. That is not the whole answer, because you need the physical courtroom for some of these proceedings and people need support. That means that, even though we were putting a lot of resource into the family justice system during the pandemic, we had a declining disposal rate. It just was not able to operate as efficiently and effectively as possible. Since then, we have been bringing things back. As I said before, what you tend to see when you get courts recovery is that you resource things up, you get the capacity going and the caseload drops, but the timeliness metric is a lagging metric. We are around that period now where we hope to see the timeliness metric catch up a bit with caseload.

Before I hand to Luke, there are a couple of things I want to mention. I take your point about 10 years, but, as Nick says, we have seen improvement. Even in the last year, we got three weeks down on average on both private and public family law. That is significant in a system of our size. Also, Pathfinder is showing some really early promise that you can shave some very good time off private family law cases, so we are also looking at how we do this fundamentally differently. The other point I was going to make is about legal aid. We know that legal aid spend has changed quite dramatically. One quite interesting fact about that is that the mean has changed a lot, but the median has not, suggesting that we have a lot more very high-end, complex, long cases in the system than we did, say, 10 years ago. There is also something real about case complexity, how that has changed and how we might want to pivot the system to deal with those very complex cases. They might involve international, for example. We are seeing more of those, and we see more of those, relatively speaking, in London and the south-east than you would maybe in Wales, and there is quite a difference in the number of weeks.

I can add a couple of points on the measurement, if that is helpful. There are two ways you can measure this. As Nick has alluded to, there is a lag indicator here in terms of what needs to happen to bring the average case duration of the whole caseload down. We are additionally monitoring the number of cases within the six-month period and the percentage that should have closed. That is part of the FJB’s targets for this financial year coming. We are seeing that improving. It was 34% of cases concluding within 26 weeks at the end of March last year. It was 38% at the beginning of this financial year, so it is going in the right direction. As other colleagues have said, there is quite significant regional variation within that. There are things that we are doing to try to improve case management in London and elsewhere, to focus on areas where we have the biggest lift to make in terms of improving average case timeliness. It is a whole-system response in terms of public law, because it is not just the courts. It is about how we ensure the right information is coming through pre-proceedings. A lot of the work that DFE has been doing with local authorities also speaks to how we ensure the right information is coming in a timely way. We are ensuring that the public law proceedings are as efficient as they can be. There is a whole range of things within there that we recognise contribute to that overall target.

Luke, if I may come in here, I will take you to paragraph 1.7 on page 15 of the Report. It says, “The government has not set out what capacity would be required to manage the caseload efficiently on a timely basis. It is therefore difficult to establish the size of any ‘backlog’ of cases and what capacity would be required to manage this”. One thing—Nick was talking about this—is a shortage of judges in London. For example, what have you done to incentivise judges who may be in retirement to come back and do a little bit of part-time work? There must be more incentives that you can do. Would you consider setting out what is required and what capacity would be required to manage this caseload efficiently?

Was judicial capacity in London the question?

That is the first question. The major question is that you have not set out what capacity would be required to manage the caseload efficiently. That is the Government as a whole. The problem with this whole process is that there are too many people involved. It needs you all to get together and work out what capacity you need in each bit of it to work out how to deal with the caseload effectively. Let us deal with that big question first and go to the judges second, if we may.

In terms of the big question, I might go first. As everyone has said several times in this, we have had reductions. Straightforwardly speaking, we are exceeding capacity, because not only are we getting through what is coming in, but we are reducing the backlog that exists. In terms of our assessment, we very much work together. That is the job of the committees and the Family Justice Board that colleagues sit on, and they will want to talk more about in a minute, but it is not so straightforward to say that nationally. As we have already explored a bit, the issues that constrain capacity in London are very different from the ones that might constrain it in Birmingham. My first overall point is that our assessment is that we are bringing everything down in the right direction, so we have enough. The question is how much more we can maximise out of the system in order to bring that backlog down and those number of weeks even further. As Luke has said, that is about capacity right across the system. Social work capacity, for example, is an element here. It is not just the capacity that exists in the courts. We might want to talk about both of those things and the assessment that different parts of the system make. I would not want the message to be that we have insufficient capacity. We have done really well on creating the capacity, but there is more to go if we want to get this backlog down even further.

That is a very hard answer to swallow for this Committee when the 26-week target is not being met, there are still 47,000 cases and, as at last December, there are still 4,000 cases waiting over 100 weeks. These are not great statistics. The statistics surely would not back up your answer that there is sufficient capacity in the system.

That is against the statistic that says that we started with 65,000 cases. We have managed to bring that down to 47,000. We have managed to reduce the number of weeks. We have managed to quite significantly reduce the cases over 100 weeks by 38% or 40%. Those are quite significant reductions that we have achieved.

Nick, one way of dealing with this is to work out where the hot spots are. We have already identified that there are not enough judges in London. What about my suggestions of encouraging more retired judges to come back and do a bit of part-time work, or maybe encouraging more salaried judges? I do not know what the specific legal answer is, but what can you do on all these matters to improve the situation?

Retired judges can work now. You know also that we have lifted the ceiling on how much fee-paid judges can sit in family jurisdictions. Over the last few years, there has been quite significant recruitment for every species of judge, for want of a better word. We have 600 judges that can sit in family. The particular pinch point—and this is particular to London and the south‑east, where it is most difficult—is district judges. Salaried district judges will make the difference in London and the south-east. We have begun to turn the tide on that. We have had the equivalent problem in other jurisdictions; we have seen that the recruitment of district judges has really helped us in, for example, the civil jurisdiction. At the moment, there is an ongoing recruitment in London and the south-east for 85 district judges. If we get those 85 district judges, we will be in a really positive place. That is different from how we have usually recruited for judges, because that is a region-specific recruitment. That is really important because that means that the judges applying for that competition know with some certainty that they will work in London and the south-east, rather than perhaps having to move their family to Lancashire, for example. That is one of the innovations where we are trying to target an area of most need and target what we believe to be one of the biggest problems for recruiting those judges. There is also a competition for another 25 or so judges nationally that is ongoing. If we get there, we will have the complement that we need in terms of judicial capacity. I have spoken a bit about legal advisers, which is a key constraint of ours. We are over-recruiting there. We have the right number of bums on the seats, but there are too many in training and they are not as efficient as those who are fully trained.

That is helpful.

The incentive to meet the deadline for the practitioners is quite clear, particularly in public law. You have a 26-week timetable—

The incentives that back that, for particularly court staff and no doubt others, is that we know that, if cases go longer, they take more work, and no one wants to have to do the work twice, to be honest. It is not great for the children, and it drives costs into the system. For those who are part of the criminal justice system, that vision of helping children by getting them through quickly and reducing costs is something that we absolutely share from top to bottom, ever since the Norgrove review. I do not think that there is any lack of incentive there. The other example I would give—this is about private law rather than public law, and thinking about whether the system is joined up and incentivised—is that Pathfinder is a very good example of where we have decided to work collectively to invest in getting cases through more quickly. Frankly, Pathfinder requires Jacky, on my right, at CAFCASS, to put her resources in a different place and resource up to make that work. It is an exemplar of good resource planning across the system. Pathfinder is quite a good example of that.

Do you mean in terms of the Family Justice Board?

You are right that there is not a statutory timeline for private law. The Family Justice Board has deliberated before on whether we should introduce that. One reason that the timing might not be quite right for that is that, particularly if we are going to look at Pathfinder, that probably resets some of the timeframes you would expect cases to be undertaken within. It might well be a thing that we come back to and look at when we are clearer on where we are going with Pathfinder. Timeliness in private law is still understood as an issue across the system. It is definitely something we continue to monitor and track at a local and regional level as well. The fact that there is not a statutory timeline should not be interpreted as meaning that we do not care about timeliness.

I was involved in the Norgrove review. The statutory timeline in public law was the first—and still, at the moment, the only—statutory time limit in the justice system. It is quite a unique thing. That is not the default in most jurisdictions. You have a 26-week limit and then you have that underpinned by the procedures of the court and the public law outline, which makes it real. In terms of incentives, if you are a party to a case and you have a judge saying, “We are going to hit the PLO”, which they have been asked to do not only in law, but through encouragement by the president of the family division, you have pretty powerful incentives to do that.

The Family Justice Board set five key priority indicators. May I ask Luke and Fran why you are not meeting four of them?

We deliberately took the decision, in 2024-25, to set targets that were stretching and drove what we hoped would be the right kind of behavioural change in the system. In setting the target that there should be no case over 100 weeks by the end of the year, we knew that that was going to be challenging. We accept that those targets have not been met but, as I said earlier in the session, we have seen quite significant improvement made as a result of having those targets, because it has had the impact of changing system behaviour and behaviour at a local level too, by incentivising the focus on long-running cases. The one target that we have met and exceeded is that reduction in the overall private law caseload, which is very positive. Some part of that is the work we have been doing through Pathfinder, which is about preparing courts to get down their backlogs before they can implement that model. That is a success that we think we can build on into next year as well. The targets that we have not met this year, as I said earlier, will be the focus of ongoing efforts through 2025-26.

When do you think you will meet them?

It will look different for different regions and areas. One thing we are doing this year is incentivising regions and local areas to focus particularly on long-running cases. Some areas, for example, will not have cases over 100 weeks. They will have very few, so we are introducing targets below that. Essentially, there is a baseline that is taken from the level they have at the end of last year.

Do you mean by region?

It will require a more tailored approach by local area and region to drive down overall cases at national level. In reality, it will always be challenging to ensure that there are no 100-week-plus cases in the system but, through introducing those regional and local targets, we can make more progress.

May I ask the same questions to Fran?

Yes, of course. I wanted to make three points, which partly go back to the previous question as well, because I did not manage to get in there. In relation to capacity, Nick was talking about capacity of the judiciary and the courts in general, and I wanted to add the capacity of social workers, which is obviously material too in relation to cases being well prepared and ready to proceed effectively through the court system. We are in a pretty good place in terms of social worker capacity. As of September last year, there were 34,300 child and family social workers, 3.7% up from the previous year and a record number since data began to be collected on this in 2017. Social workers also have the lowest caseload that they have had since we have started collecting data on that, so an average of just over 15 cases per full-time social worker, which is a reduction of 2.3 compared with 2017. We are in a really positive place in terms of social worker capacity, but that is not to say that social worker capacity in local authorities does not contribute to delay in the family justice system. It clearly does, but we are driving in the right direction. We are seeing positive signs that people want to join social work, they are staying in social work longer than they were and there is better continuity of case holding and continuity of employment, which we know contributes to better outcomes. I also wanted to talk about demand. I thought that Amy’s characterisation of the different drivers of delay and our understanding of that was helpful to segment it. We have talked quite a bit about productivity of the system, which is really important; once a case is in the system, making that case run through as effectively as possible, because we know that that is much better for children and families that are in the system, and we are all focused on trying to achieve a better experience and a better outcome. Clearly, in children’s life terms, 50 weeks is a very long time, so we need to always keep focus on that. The DFE major contribution to the overall system is to reduce the flow of cases coming through to the family court. We are talking a little bit as if the caseload is static, but of course it is not. It is continually evolving. Successive Governments have, frankly, under-invested in children’s social care and preventive services. Successive Ministers have talked, I am sure, at this Committee and certainly at the Education Committee about that. That is really changing now. At the most recent spending review, we announced over £2 billion of new investment in children’s social care. The major element of that is going into better family support, so that more and more children can stay safely with their families and do not ever go into the family court system. We are not yet seeing any of the fruits of that in the stock, if you like, that is before the family courts now, but over a short number of years I really hope that the flow coming through will be reduced.

How long do you think it will take to meet those remaining four indicators?

I do not have a different assessment from Luke’s, because we share that assessment. Both our Ministers chair the Family Justice Board. We are both involved in the official-level committee that sits underneath the Family Justice Board, so we share all the data. I do not have a different assessment of timeliness and when we will achieve those targets. Luke is absolutely right that nationally we are in a really different place. Nick has explained that too. The difference in Birmingham and Wales versus London and the south-east is really significant. We are seeking to drive the system nationally as far and as effectively as we can, but also with that differential regional approach, so that we can get a gain in every region, rather than setting targets that are very stretching for some regions and do not push individual regions sufficiently.

To phrase that question slightly differently, if you came back this time next year, how much will have changed?

To my point about new cases coming through, I would expect there to be a significantly reduced flow of new cases, because far more families will be coping well at home and will not ever get into the family court system. In terms of how that stacks up numerically, we would be happy to come back to the Committee and talk about that. I am sure that the Family Justice Board will be watching that very closely and monitoring the progress. As Nick and others have said, we have made significant inroads. That is against some really hard cases. Some of these longest-running cases are the ones that are most complex, and so closing those is a significant achievement.

I know that we have thrown a lot of stats out here today, but I would really hope that, if we came back in a year, we would be talking about at least the same sort of percentage reductions again. That is my sincere hope for the system. On the private law side, we are all really invested in Pathfinder. The speed at which we can roll that out will dictate how much progress we make in the next year. As has been said, on the public side some of it will also depend on how much we start to see the reducing volume coming in. I have already prayed in aid that we have made good progress; I know that more needs to be done in a year, but I would really hope that we would be saying at least as good next year.

I would appeal for short questions from colleagues and short answers from witnesses, please. We are only a quarter of the way through and well over a third of the time. If we do not want to be here until midnight, we have to speed up a bit.

I can skip through quite a lot of what I was going to ask. As a London MP, I am obviously very interested in why it takes so much longer to get through family court cases in London, but we have already covered quite a lot of that quite extensively. I wanted to follow up. Mr Goodwin, we have talked about capacity constraints and you have talked already about some of what is being done to address the shortage of district judges in London, which you have talked about being one of the main pinch points. Elsewhere in the Report, in paragraph 3.12, it talks about productivity. I think in Suffolk and Essex you can get through one case a day, whereas in London it is only 0.6 cases a day. Could you talk a little bit more about why London is lagging behind in productivity?

Quite a lot of it comes down to complexity in London, or certainly a good part of the answer is to do with complexity in London. It depends on public and private law but, generally speaking, you have more complicated cases, often with international dimensions and so forth, that require more extensive searches for information on the family and, frankly, interpretation and translation services. That tends to be a factor in London. In public law, you also have 33 local authorities and, with 33 local authorities, there are 33 ways of doing things. Although that is becoming much more standardised, that is also a feature. London is a complex beast because of the nature of the cases, but also because London is a complicated place to run administratively. There has been quite good progress in London. There has been a specific project in London with funding for extra sitting days and extra court staff—case progression officers who will drive cases through the court and look to support staff. There is actually some reason to be quite positive about certainly the amount of effort that is going on in London, with some results. Luke, do you want to say more on London?

I am mindful of the steer to be brief. There is more we could say on London, and I know it involves CAFCASS as well. There is a whole multi-partner and judiciary effort to try to improve productivity further in in London. I am sure we could let the Committee have more detail on that.

Various responses have talked about Pathfinder. Do we think that rolling out Pathfinder in London is going to be part of that improving picture of productivity?

Potentially, yes. The challenge we will have in in London is reducing the current private law caseloads to a level where we can safely roll it out. There are issues around the phasing and implementation of Pathfinder, which we are looking at, pending the funding decisions we will make in allocations following the spending review. Certainly we think it would have an additional impact, but we will need to work through carefully some of the implementation issues in London.

Straightforwardly, we think that the answer is yes, but we also know that, in order for that to be successful, you have to get the backlog down to a certain level before you can attempt that. That will be harder in London than areas that we have piloted so far.

Is that because there are more private law cases in London—just picking up on what Mr Taylor was saying?

There are more private law cases in London. I can sense that Jacky wants to come in, because it has a significant implication for CAFCASS.

All I wanted to add was that we struggle with social work recruitment in London, and Pathfinder requires a sizeable increase in number of social workers, so the answer is “Yes, but…”

You could ask me about pretty much any topic in the MOJ and I would say that recruiting and retaining staff right across a range of services in London is more challenging than it is in Wales, for example.

What you have not said so far in what you have said to us today is, “We are responsible for this. We are in charge of it. We know what the challenges are and how to put them right”. Does anyone want to put their hand up and say that?

Yes. I am very prepared to put a hand up and say that we understand the challenges here and what we can do about it. We are in fact rolling out things to do about it, but it is not one answer for every part of the country.

Okay, but the NAO Report, which you have all signed off, says that the Family Justice Board does not have an overall assessment of the main drivers of delays. We have had analysis carried out. There have been reviews by MOJ, DFE and others, and 25 contributing factors have been identified, but there is no overall understanding of the different factors and their importance in contributing to the delays and how they are going to be put right. No one seems to pull that together. Is that because so many different organisations and Departments are involved that, in the end, no one ends up being responsible?

We understand the causes of delay and we have already talked about quite a few of them in this session today. We are relentlessly focused on timeliness and every different agency and organisation represented here would say the same. We are saying, though, that breaking that down into a very simple, “This is what it is, and this is what we can do about it”, is not that straightforward. I don’t know whether you want to say anything from a DFE perspective.

I agree with that exactly. There are too many cases being brought into the family justice system and the system itself does not always operate as swiftly as it should. We all have a relevant part in understanding that and seeking to address it. We are working in really close partnership to do that.

Why did you all sign up to this NAO Report that basically says that the whole thing is fragmented and there is no overall assessment—no robust assessment of the scale and impact of the issues affecting performance? You cannot begin to get things right if you do not analyse properly why things are wrong in the first place, can you?

We have done a lot of work on analysing the data. We really value and enjoy our relationship with the NAO but, as you can appreciate, as these reports go through, we have lots of dialogue and conversations about whether that is exactly the way—

You have agreed this conclusion.

We have lots of dialogue about whether—

You have agreed this conclusion. It is in the Report.

It is in the Report, but we do not agree that we do not have a shared view of exactly what the drivers of delay are. What we do agree with, and where we found the NAO Report very valuable, is that we could do more about data and evidence and how we collect that and publish it through the system. We very much agree that that would be a helpful approach. Luke and others can talk you through what more we are doing.

The NAO Report says, “We cannot identify the scale and impact on overall performance of each issue identified, because the reviews differed in scope, and depth of analysis was limited by available data”. That is in the Report. You have agreed the Report.

As I say, we agree that there is more to do on data and evidence I do not know whether you want to pick a bit of that up, Luke.

As you say, Amy, we recognise the recommendations around improving data and evidence and potentially publishing a long-term statement of intent. We have talked here about the shared view that, across the system, we want to do more to get cases out of court that do not need to be there. We want to make sure that the cases that come to court are processed as efficiently and effectively as possible and that we do more to understand implications for the outcomes of particular groups and what is happening with, particularly, survivors of domestic abuse within the system. We have a shared view of what we want to do. I know that the Report uses the word “fragmented”. I do not think that that is a word that we would use to characterise the governance that we have to ensure delivery. We acknowledge it is a complex system.

It is back to this business again of a Report being produced, the Department agreeing and then coming and telling us, “Actually, we did not really agree with that little bit, because it is not quite how we would have expressed it”.

We did read it, but we have dialogue in the process about it.

You have agreed it.

It is just as you say. We would not agree that it is a fragmented system. We agree that it is a very complex system.

It is a fragmented and complex system.

We genuinely believe—those sitting on this side of the table—that we are working really hard together and our collective aims are very clear, but in a very complex system.

I do not think that anyone is saying that no one is working hard. It is a question of whether the working hard is joined up and based on available data that you collected and all agree upon.

We definitely feel joined up. We definitely feel that we agree on the data that we have. We also agree with the recommendation that we could do more on data together, collectively. For example, you might want to speak to CAFCASS in a minute. It has done really well on its data and evidence collection, as the Report states, and we could do more in that direction.

We are much clearer on the data we have than we ever have been before—certainly, Jacky and I go back 15 years, and we are in a much better place now. Can I give you an example of where we are getting better? We have rolled out a digitalised system in public law and that is giving us much richer, better data than we have ever had before in public law. In private law we are not quite there yet, but we are about to roll out a fully digitalised system in private law. That will give us access to much better information on protected characteristics of all the children and so forth going through the system and live information about where they are in the system at which point in time. That is really important to allow us to do the problem analysis. Critically, our system will have a live API into the CAFCASS system, so it will be able to pull the same data off and interrogate the same data. We should get a better understanding of what needs to be done because of that. That is a big step forward.

It is also not just about what data we have but what we do with it. I would like to offer the Committee a commitment to a discussion that we want to have about particular triggers that cause the most delay. For example, with an expert on a case you will add something like 30 weeks. We ought to be talking more regularly about how many experts are on cases, what they are doing and where they are doing it. There are probably five or six real drivers of delay that we could talk together about. Our systems will join up to some extent, in the way that Nick has said, but never be one system, because there is not the money available. We could absolutely target the things that make the cases go on longer and use the data that we have to do that.

Who is going to pull together those targets and make sure that, by next year, you have a completely different story to tell us?

I would like to suggest that the FJB do that.

That means us jointly, collectively owning that. If I could add to the complexity point, Jacky referred there to different national systems, which add complexity, but in the bit of the system that I am most closely linked to, the services are delivered by something like 152 different local authorities. There is not a single children’s social care system, just as there is not a single NHS, I guess. It is all these different bodies delivering services locally. From the DFE perspective, we have tried to significantly improve the consistency of those services through the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which is in the House of Lords today, and through things such as the national framework, which for the first time has set out how children’s social care services should be delivered, so that we are getting more consistent outcomes nationally.

I am sure that we might be coming back to ask for some clear assurances and timeframes for how this improvement will be delivered collectively, on a joined-up basis.

Nick Goodwin, I am hearing quite a lot of complacency today, which, for a system that is not working terribly well, surprises me. Paragraph 12 on data states that “challenges with IT systems remain, and there are significant data gaps and some data quality issues. For example, there is limited information on the families being supported. Cafcass collects the age, gender and ethnicity of the children it supports, but HMCTS does not. It is not yet possible to follow a child through the family justice process”. In a modern age where we all ought to be able to share data, that is a fair indictment, is it not?

It certainly needs to be better than it is currently. I am not being complacent about that at all. There are plans to make it a lot better and by 12 months’ time they will be in place. We have much better information now in public law on children’s circumstances, what is going on with the case, the number of experts and so forth. Over the next year, we will be rolling out a private law system, which will give us very much better information on all those things that you have spoken about in private law cases. I am not at all complacent about what we have now. I am pointing to the fact that we have been working incredibly hard on something that I think will be really powerful for the future.

I am delighted to hear that.

Is it possible to add to that? The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill contains a provision to introduce for the first time a single child unique identifier, which is a manifesto commitment. That is a really material difference that will enable us to track an individual child’s journey through the system once that comes into force. Obviously that will be a little way off because we will need regulations and will want to deliver it effectively and carefully, but it is a really important change that will ensure consistency in how we are identifying individual children.

Thank you for putting that on the record.

I should probably start by saying that I currently have a private Member’s Bill going through the Commons that will try to bring some of these video hearings into action—I am not sure whether I need to declare that or not, but I have done. The NAO Report, in paragraph 3.6, talks about an administrative process review that it did for His Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service, from receiving a court application, against its good practice framework, and identified issues with the efficient administration, stating, “The way the process is managed across administrative and legal staff resulted in multiple errors, duplication or unnecessary effort… A lack of confirmed quality requirements was leading to variation in the quality of content… Court caseworkers accepted duplication and rework as part of their job”. The NAO also found that there was “poor data input, but no collective understanding of how often it occurs”. What are you going to do to reduce duplication and increase efficiency of court administration across the piece?

I am very keen to talk to the NAO about that underlying data and that underlying information. I will have to explain a little bit where we have come from. We can be more efficient and much more productive across the system. Working with colleagues here, we have been trying to put in place the digital foundations for that. In public law, as I have said, it is already in. We are much more administratively efficient in public law than we have ever been before. That sounds dry, but it means that my staff are spending five hours preparing a case for public law hearing rather than 25 hours, which means that they can do other things. Some 98% of local authorities now provide things to us virtually and upload all the documents virtually, and are reporting that that is giving them a 50% efficiency saving. We can see that, on public law, we have a really good digital system that drives productivity and efficiency into the system. On private law, we are very much targeting exactly the same thing. Private law is much bigger. You are dealing with litigants in person, as well as represented clients, and that is how we intend to be much more productive in private law. That will be rolling out over the course of the next year. We have been piloting extensively. Critically, we have been making sure that it has the insights from people who use the system and that it works for them, for our staff and for the judges, so that they feel able to operate it well and that it is slick and efficient. That is going to be a big productivity gain over the coming period. We are not quite there yet. We are in a sort of halfway house. Given that the system is not fully digitalised and we have not been able to design out quite a lot of those areas, it is not surprising that, in some corners, in some cases and in some areas there are some issues and we would like to go through them in further detail. I also have to say that change is quite hard. Digitalising the system is quite hard and it is quite possible also that what we are hearing in that study is people saying that it is now heard by a centralised service centre. Our cases are administrated by a really great team in Stoke, rather than the local court. That might be interpreted as duplication. Where we are finding any duplication, where we are getting any feedback, we are already tweaking our processes so that that is managed out. That is a big part of the productivity story.

That is good to hear. If I were you guys and I had read that NAO Report paragraph, I would be frightened about the sort of operation I was running and the efficiency of that operation. The overarching point here, without getting too much into the politics, is one of fairness. We talked at the start about those children who are waiting 100 weeks or more to be seen in these cases. I understand that there are problems with a backlog and that there are time delays for various reasons that we have talked about, but there are people waiting on the end of these cases. Those people feel let down currently and then they see organisations such as the NAO talking about duplication and inefficiency, and the number of hearings being attributed to cases is going up and the number of reports being given to cases is going up. It is almost getting more lethargic.

Can I just reassure you? When we are finding anywhere that the process could be improved, we already make processes more and more efficient, and we will continue to for evermore. We are not, within HMCTS, for example, entirely in control of how many hearings there are per case. That requires every agency to work in line with the judge’s directions in a case. Again, I come back to the Pathfinder initiative. Where we have that in place, where we have all the agencies lined up, doing exactly what is required of them, the number of hearings per case is coming down incredibly quickly. I completely agree with you. If there is any inefficiency in the system, it is bad for the systems and for the taxpayer and it is really bad for children. That is costly. I am totally with you. I am trying to give you confidence that we are absolutely on to it. We have massive reform coming. We do access to justice assessments in all our services. That means that we are picking up inefficiencies in an area or particular people struggling. We will make the process better to iron those out.

On the characterisation that we sound complacent, we are stodgy or we are getting worse, you do not get reductions of 38% and 40% in cases over 100 weeks because we are getting less efficient. That simply does not stack. We are getting more efficient. I am not arguing that there is not more that could be done, but those things just are not true. We are seeing reductions. All these indicators are going in the right direction.

As I say, without getting into the tit-for-tat, we have so many Departments that come here and tell us that and then the NAO says different. The NAO says that the long-term trends are not great. The NAO says that caseworkers do not have a collective understanding of how often this occurs. They do not collect the data and they do not accept that duplication and rework occurs.

To be fair, the NAO also says that performance is improving and we have done better in this than many other jurisdictions.

My final question is about the number of cases being cancelled at usually quite late stages, which was something like 32% between January 2023 and November 2024. What can you do to make sure that cases are not being cancelled when they go through?

Some of it is to do with capacity. The main reason cases are cancelled or adjourned, in over 25% of cases, is non-compliance with what the judge has ordered parties to do. Sometimes that is a capacity issue on an agency, and sometimes it is to do with parents not being readily compliant with what the court is asking of them. That is the biggest driver, but there are also some issues about capacity of social workers to be able to produce reports on time. There is also something here we have to remember. Again, we cannot be complacent about this, but it is a fact of the family justice system that people’s lives are dynamic. One of the main reasons cases are adjourned is because you need an updated report for that case to happen and that is, frankly, because it has languished in the system too long. As we have said here, getting caseloads down and driving that timeliness to a better place is a virtuous circle in terms of reducing the number of adjournments in cases.

That makes sense. Thank you.

I will be really quick; I am just adding a little bit. Mediation is something that would prevent delays, prevent costs and prevent trauma. How feasible is it to encourage families and people to go through that alternative route? On top of that, why do you think your voucher scheme did not take up the increase in mediation? How well and often do you meet with the Law Society, the members of which are your foot soldiers on the frontline? I would have thought that their information and data and everything they have is absolutely crucial to what you are doing, but I am just not hearing that from you today at all.

On your first point about mediation vouchers, we agree with everything you are saying. It is a really useful part of the system. That is why we have been trying to do the voucher scheme, because we know it has such good success for the take-up. Luke, do you want to pick up the specific question?

On the take-up, we are seeing mediation vouchers being used and the take-up of the scheme increasing year on year. Since it started, over 40,000 families have accessed the vouchers. You can access a voucher before having the court order you to attend a MIAM. Some of the volume we are seeing is not necessarily reflected in the NAO Report, which mentions that the number of people attending the MIAMs has stayed relatively flat. Absolutely, we see it as a key tool to reduce private law demand. This is correlation rather than causation, but the fact we have had the scheme and, over that same time period, we have seen a 10% year-on-year reduction in caseloads is encouraging. On the Law Society, there are clearly questions about how we engage the sector. We do some of that through the Family Mediation Council. We do talk to the legal and representative bodies. You can also get legally aided, funded mediation as well. We are happy to take on board other ways we can engage with legal reps, but that is part of the conversations that we are having at the moment.

I would encourage some more.

Just quickly going back to the mediation point, do you think that it is a risk in terms of good outcomes for more cases to be encouraged to go through mediation, rather than going through the court process? If you do, what mitigation can you put in place around that risk?

The key thing we would say is that mediation has to be safe and appropriate. That is one of the things that gets assessed in the MIAM, which is to understand whether there are potential allegations of domestic abuse or other reasons why it would not be appropriate. Clearly, if that is the case, we would not be advising it. Those safeguards are in place to ensure that people are committed to it and there is an absence of other issues there, to make sure that it is safe and appropriate.

Fran, just quickly, do you want to bring in the family group meetings as well? I know they are slightly different from mediation.

I am happy to. They are linked. In the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, there is a provision to require an offer of family group decision making before public proceedings are taken to bring a child into care. There is really good evidence that harnessing the broader kinship options in an extended family can lead to a child avoiding going into formal state care, which not only avoids significant cost to the public purse but, more importantly, delivers far better outcomes for those children who are kept within an extended family who love them and can care for them well. That is being extended as part of the Bill and we hope will reduce the number of children coming into care, leading to longer-term better outcomes for those children too.

Luke Taylor, again, I am sorry to be so critical today, but what I am hearing just does not meet the facts of the cases that we have been hearing. On mediation, your answer was protecting the status quo. We have had evidence, for example, from Elizabeth Lucy Robillard saying that there ought to be mandatory mediation at every available opportunity. Much greater use could be made of mediation; it would keep cases out of the courts, it would be less contentious and it would probably be settled quicker, which would be to the benefit of the children. I am wondering again whether you are defending the status quo, when we could be considering changes.

I am sure there are things we could consider about how we improve the uptake.

Surely, the answer ought to be that mediation is mandatory, unless there are specific safeguarding issues for the child.

That is how the court process should work. If you are filling in a C100 form for child arrangements, you essentially have to declare why mediation would not be appropriate and then attest to that form when you submit it to the court. The changes that have been made to some of those forms and the family procedural committees that came into force in April last year are attempting to reduce the reasons for exemptions and improve compliance and take-up. We are looking at that through the court procedurals and other ways that we can ensure greater take-up.

I also want to ask about the increase in litigants in person, because that has been highlighted in the Report. To what extent is that increasing the pressure on court resources and contributing to delays?

First of all, we recognise that there is more than just timeliness that matters. We need to make sure that we have the proper outcome. There is not any evidence that litigants in person increase delays. We still know that the longest cases that we have are those where both applicants are represented, as opposed to the opposite, but we are doing a lot to support litigants in person. There are a few things. First, we have supported 60 organisations with over £6 million just in this year in order to have better advice for litigants in person. In terms of Pathfinder, Nick has already mentioned that we have a specific case progression officer. That has proved to be very helpful indeed for litigants in person. Those are a few of the things that we are doing.

I have spoken a bit about the digitalisation of the private courts. They have been designed with user need in mind. We have spent a lot of time with potential litigants in person, asking them how we can construct our front end of the courts, the digital process, to reduce their chance of making errors and allow them to understand better what they need to do and what their experience in court will be like. There is a whole range of things.

I apologise to our witnesses; I should have said at the beginning that I have to go to another important meeting. We will take a break now for five minutes and then my very able deputy, Clive, will be taking over after that. Sitting suspended.  On resuming— [Mr Clive Betts took the Chair]

Welcome back to the Committee’s hearing. As Sir Geoffrey explained before we broke up, he has had to go off to another meeting. I am taking over as the Chair for the rest of this afternoon’s session. I will begin by asking further questions. You told us as witnesses before that you have been looking at various ways to bring about improvements to the service. You have engaged in various reviews and also various initiatives. One of them was the Pathfinder courts pilot. What have you learned from that? Do you have plans to roll that out across the country?

I will start, and I am sure a few colleagues will want to come in on this. First of all, we have learned an awful lot. We have an evaluation that is running for two years. We have learned, as we have said many times before, that it has successfully reduced the number of weeks that it takes to get a private law case through. We have also learned, though, that you need to reduce the backlog before you introduce it. We have also learned that, although it is fiscally neutral, it changes where we place the costs and the burden on the system. It goes more towards the front end, which sounds logical to everyone here, I am sure, but we need to think about how we change the system to do that. We have rolled out additional places; Luke might want to talk more about that. We have an ambition to go as far and as fast as we can, but that does depend on allocations. Although it is overall fiscally neutral, in order to get places ready to accept, there is a need to invest prior to doing that.

I can say a bit about where it is and where it is planned to go next, if that is helpful. At the moment, it is in six court areas, including all the family judge areas in Wales, in addition to Dorset, Birmingham and West Yorkshire, which went live at the beginning of June. We have plans to roll it out to another four areas before the end of this financial year, and that includes three areas in the midlands, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. Preparation is taking place now to ready those areas. As Amy said, one of the key bits of learning we have developed from the pilot is the length of time it takes to prepare for implementation. That is getting the backlog down, but it is also recruiting the right staff. It also involves commissioning the services, the independent domestic violence advisers to provide advice in court, as they are an integral part of the model. There is quite a lot of preparation work that is required in those areas. As Amy said, one of the things we are testing at the moment is how we make that overall fiscal argument and how we understand the costs—both the implementation costs and the business-as-usual costs—and how we develop a business case that supports national roll‑out. It has significant potential to improve efficiency. I am sure Jacky will want to say something about the implications for CAFCASS, because we recognise that they are significant in terms of both what it means for numbers of staff, and what it means for practice and how they work.

There is a lot that has been learned from Pathfinder. First and foremost, it is right for children to be seen earlier in their proceedings and to be given an opportunity for the court to hear what life is like for them. That was the main driver. Secondly, the resource allocation to specialist domestic abuse advisers has been welcomed by victims and survivors. There is more to do on how you evaluate the quality of those services, but absolutely we have learned about that. Clearing the backlog is critical to success. For CAFCASS, we currently see 30% of children in family court proceedings that are private. That will flip to be about 80% in the Pathfinder model. It is very efficient for the courts and for HMCTS, but for us it requires a lot more social workers. We are talking about that with MOJ all the time, and in the Pathfinder test sites those social work allocations have been made and the work is happening. Fidelity to the model is something that is coming out in the learning. One final decision hearing is the efficient way to do this. Sometimes, there is the temptation to need more information and a second report or a second hearing but, if we stick with the final decisions hearing and one report, it will be more efficient for the system. That requires culture change everywhere—for the courts as well. Lastly, using the proceedings to make an order, rather than to test the arrangements for children, is another piece of learning for us. For example, if a child has not had contact with a parent for some time, but there are no safeguarding or welfare concerns, then agreeing that the contact will start before the proceedings have ended, rather than waiting to test them, is a very important piece of evidence from Pathfinder so far.

Two questions pose themselves. First, if it is such a great idea, why has it taken so long to roll it out?

As Luke has said, we have given you a bit of the pace of roll-out, but we have done two evaluations alongside it. We are doing both a process evaluation and an evaluation of financial costs. There are a couple of reasons, to answer your question directly. One is that, given how important we all think looking after children is, it is not something we wanted to rush and get wrong. We have to make sure we are doing this properly, that we get the right outcomes and that it is safe. Secondly, as Jacky has highlighted, this does require us to flip resources in the system quite significantly. In order for this to be a success, you have to get the backlog down. You have to have more social work capacity up front. That takes a little bit of time.

Government are not good, are they, at moving resources from one Department to another, even if the overall spend is no greater and the outputs are better?

We have had a bit of back and forth on this already today. Inherent in this is, “Who owns this one system?”, and what people might be getting at with the question “Who owns this one, complex system?” is that we will not do that. Pathfinder is a really good example that we will. We are prepared, to get the best outcomes, to move cost from one part of the system. It is not that we are not prepared to do it or will not do it. It is more that it takes time. Jacky has to have that social work capacity. That is something that DFE has been working on for a long time. It does just take some time to create it, rather than the will to want to flip resources in the system.

There is a plan to switch resources to enable this to happen more quickly, is there?

We have successfully achieved it in the Pathfinder areas where we have had it, but we have to have a roll-out that allows us to do that.

That was not quite the question I asked. Is there a plan now to how you are going to switch resources to enable a roll-out to occur at a faster pace?

There is a plan. Jacky, for example, has a transformation plan, as we have just heard. It is a big issue for them, but we will not be able to do that really quickly and flip it all at once. It will have to be a plan that takes time and we are slightly dependent on allocation resources as well across the piece.

It is like a chicken and egg, is it not? Which comes first? “We can’t do this because we don’t have the allocation of resources, but we can’t really ask for the allocation of resources because we don’t have the plan that requires them.”

We are doing it. That is the first thing I would say. We have expanded Pathfinder quite significantly.

Can you give us a timeframe, then, for a roll-out?

We cannot, in total terms, give you a timeframe for complete roll-out, but our expansion has sped up quite significantly over the last 12 months.

For the future, if you want to go quicker, do you have a plan to go quicker?

We will have a plan. This will be a big programme change and we will have to have a costed plan for how we do that. Partly to your point, Chair, about how we shift those costs, one of the reasons why we are not doing this at the moment in a “big bang” approach is because, in phasing it, we are a bit more able to look at what the implementation costs are for a particular tranche and make that provision in a particular year. That is informing our thinking at the moment. A phased approach is probably the best way to roll this out.

Then a plan with a phased approach would be helpful.

That is what we are working on at the moment.

We have established that, to implement Pathfinder everywhere, CAFCASS would need something in the order of 200 more social workers. When the allocation is settled and we have an implementation plan of where and when, we will seek to recruit those social workers.

Again, it is this business of, “We are not going to recruit them until we get the plan, but we can’t have a plan, because we need the social workers”. Perhaps someone can have a look at putting that together, because that is the next question I am going to ask. Between the Departments, Amy and Fran, do you have an idea about what a good service actually looks like, how you are going to improve and in what areas to deliver it?

We have a very good sense of what good would look like, what improvements look like and how we get there. One of the things that the NAO Report has sharpened our focus on is that we could probably do more of a strategy-style document that tries to lay out collectively, across all the organisations you see here today, what we think good looks like and what we are aiming for. The strength of this complex system is that we do have shared views.

I am happy to add. From a child’s perspective, we have a very good understanding of what good looks like. DFE published a document towards the end of last year called Case Stories, which brought to life some of the experiences of children in the system and parents in the system, mothers in particular. It was very clear from them that they want swift access to family justice where they need to be in the system. They want to understand what is going on. They want to have a voice and be heard, and they want to get a good outcome. It is very clear that our focus is providing that and providing answers to that. As I said earlier, a large part of that is ensuring that only cases that really need to be in the system are ever in the system, because that then enables the rest of the system to work more effectively.

There is nowhere I can read that strategy across Departments, is there?

In terms of children’s social care, there is a strategy document published.

There is nothing that is linked together.

For children’s social care, a lot of those children will not go into the family justice system, and that is a good outcome for them. We have a very clear strategy that sets out, end to end, what their experience should be in terms of social work. I hear you that we do not have a shared strategy. Amy has just said maybe that is something that we can look at doing. The Family Justice Board has these shared objectives and targets. We could look to put more narrative and clarity around that, but that is not something we have done to date.

That is exactly the point I was just going to make. We have talked about them today already, but we have very clear priorities in the Family Justice Board, which represents right across the system. We also have the local family justice boards, but we could put some more narrative around that, if that would be helpful, as to why we have chosen those targets and so on.

The Family Justice Board is supposed to do it. It has not been very effective, has it? It meets two and a half times a year. It is almost an afterthought, when it fits in somebody’s diary to actually have a meeting.

The Family Justice Board is the convening authority, if you like, where we bring all the key people in the system together. A lot of the work gets transacted through the subgroups we have at official level that meet very regularly. Senior leaders around the system are getting together. They are looking at performance. They are looking at priorities. They are looking at areas that are not performing well. That collective effort that underpins the Family Justice Board when we get together with Ministers is absolutely there and has been for the last two years. There have been issues, I know, with Ministers and the change in Administration, which are par for the course, but the underpinning commitment in terms of the agencies involved is very much there.

If I could just add one point, I know Luke mentioned the children’s board that sits underneath the Family Justice Board earlier, but it is really powerful that, at the outset of every single Family Justice Board, we hear from the children with lived experience of the system. That really makes everybody who attends those meetings—the Ministers, the president of the family division—sit up and listen, because it is really compelling to hear personal testimony about their experience.

What about the local family justice boards? Do they have any meaningful role? They are all disparate, are they not? The Family Justice Board does not have any authority over them. They are separate bits and pieces in the system.

They are a vital part of the landscape and we will want to bring in more detail. As we have talked about at length already in this Committee, you absolutely have to have those local family justice boards, because the problems in Wales and Birmingham are not the same as the problems in London.

As you say, they are a key part of the system. That is where local partners get brought together. In terms of how well they are operating, we acknowledge that there are some variable issues around their operation. Over the last couple of years, to improve how they work, we have standardised terms of reference, improved guidance for chairs and ensured we are bringing together LFJBs on a more regular basis to talk about performance. We talk to them at least twice a year, in a group setting across all LFJBs, about the FJB’s priorities. This year, we will be asking the local family justice boards, as I said earlier in the session, to produce action plans that show what steps they are taking to meet the priorities set by the national Family Justice Board and what steps they are taking to meet the specific targets in their areas. They will be reporting back to us halfway through the year. We are certainly working on some of those points around how we ensure connection. We have a representative from the local family justice boards, on a rotating basis, attending the national Family Justice Board. We are very much trying to improve that sense of two-way communication with LFJBs. We recognise, though, there are still probably more things that we could do to improve how effectively they work. We recognise that sometimes they struggle with things such as administrative resource, but they are a real strength in terms of the added value they put into the system. One of the strengths they have is that the chairs who lead them are drawn from a wide range of organisations:12 of the 44 are chaired by senior managers from CAFCASS. We also have senior court staff, legal representatives, solicitors and so on chairing those bodies. They are a real source of insight as to what is actually happening in the system at a local level.

I, like Sarah, have quite a few years’ experience working in children’s social care across a couple of London boroughs. I am trying to be objective with this, because I have to say, over the last 10 years, I have seen improvements—that is without question. I can see the work that has gone into it. Jacky and I know many of the same people. If I can be parochial, in Bromley, they are seeing good relations with CAFCASS and the family courts. I do recognise that. If I could pitch back towards looking at the data and how the data is monitored, could you talk a little bit about what gaps you have in the data? What are you doing to fill those gaps and make sure that we have all the information we need for family justice?

Thanks very much for your comments. Shall I do some high level and then bring in all the various parties to this? It is a big landscape. We have done quite a lot to improve it. Nick has already talked about the HMCTS systems and how we have rolled out new digital systems. Certainly, in public law, that has given us access to a whole new load of data. We should definitely bring in Jacky, because the bar for a lot of good data collection has absolutely come from CAFCASS. There is some work going on in the DFE as well. Just to quickly supplement the last answer, Luke, I wonder if we want to talk about the performance dashboards at all and what access we have given. Is it all right if we run through those super quickly?

I will ’fess up on our issues. As I say, for public law, from an HMCTS perspective, at least, we have good data. We have much better data than we have ever had before on the individuals in the system, where they are in the system and also the problems in their case that may be causing delay, such as number of experts and that sort of stuff. That is pretty good. Private law is lagging behind. Our systems in private law are not as well developed. In particular, they lack full demographic data. It will tell you a child’s sex and age, but not much beyond that. We would like much richer information on demographics and protected characteristics, and we also want better data, the equivalent of what we have in public law, on what is causing delay or an adjournment, for example, in each individual case. As I said before, the good news is that that is coming. That is being designed in from the outset in our private law system. As that rolls out over the next 12 months, we will get much better data. Again, as I said before, that data ships over to CAFCASS through an API automatically.

Can I pause there? I want to come back to the demographics in the second part of my question. Some of the issues that were raised with some of the cases that were lost were around human error. I know in the Report it says that things are being put in place to make sure that those cases that are closed due to human error can be reduced. Can you tell us a little bit about how you are approaching that? I will come back to the demographics issue.

On human error, data closure, data cleansing and so forth, yes, that does happen. Across the entirety of HMCTS, we are doing a data quality assurance process. We have a new data quality strategy. We are going through every single jurisdiction looking at all known areas and then, effectively, we are remedying them. Really importantly, in relation to human error, people under pressure in courts sometimes do the wrong thing. We are tackling that in a number of ways. We are upping our resource that we put into assurance around key processes in the courts. First of all, we are getting those processes absolutely nailed. We are making it easier for court staff and others to understand what needs to happen in any individual case. Generally speaking, we are also making sure that the safeguards that should be part of the process are designed in—we have done that—and that they are being applied. We are putting, for example, 200 more FTE resources into HMCTS to make sure that the incidence of human error is reduced. There is another thing that is really important: as our data becomes more accurate, we can spot error now in a way that we have never been able to before. When the cases were manual and on paper, frankly, errors probably would have occurred—be they administrative or judicial—and you would never have known about it. Now we can see, intervene and mop up much more quickly when we think there has been an error.

You highlighted those key demographics in terms of the data that we were missing, but it is also about ensuring that cases involving people suffering domestic abuse were being picked up. Can you tell us what you are doing to improve that?

Jacky will want to come in. I can give you an example. Under the current system, someone who is subject to domestic abuse may well want a special measure in court. In a private law case, if you are the applicant, you would say, “I would like X special measure” on what is called a C100 form. Currently, we are rolling out automation of that through a digital process, so that, yes, you can still do that, but you can be much more specific in terms of what is appropriate for you, given the nature of your domestic abuse. It also means that the respondent in a case has an opportunity to also give that information, which is more difficult for them to do at the moment. They tend to have to do so on the day. We have an established process with all our systems whereby, through what we call our access to justice assessments, we pick up on individuals with individual needs, look at what is not going right for them and then we can sort the process out. That will happen for evermore, effectively.

That is happening at pace now. We are getting better at that more quickly. Did you want to come in on anything, Jacky?

I did want to just say something about data and outcomes. There is something about getting the input data right, but we do not know enough yet or interrogate enough yet, because we have not spent enough time on the data regarding what happens to people, children particularly, at the end of proceedings. That requires resource investment, because everybody stops at the end of proceedings, when the case is closed, but children do say they want us to know what happens to them. There is a question for us about what outcomes family justice delivers for children and families. We need to know more about people who come back. We think about 30% of people come back into court. Why are they coming back? What are we doing about that? Can we narrow the door on how many come back? As I said before, there are some things that trigger long durations for cases that we could talk more regularly about, and we need our data to be flashing a bit louder on some of that.

That comes back to something you touched on earlier, Frances. You were talking about what children, families and carers want from this process. Looking at that in the round, how do you ensure that a child is getting a good-quality experience, as best you can, as they go through the process, before, during and, as Jacky just picked up, afterwards, so we stop that loop back into the system?

I am happy to talk a bit about that. That is more in the DFE space, because the children’s social worker will have an ongoing relationship with them and with the family, and will have the best understanding, in terms of professionals, of what those outcomes are. Jacky is right that we do not have consistent data on that currently. That is something we could be and should be looking to improve. The other area that we do not collect national data on, which I wanted to bring out for the Committee, is children who are subject to pre-proceedings. The Department commissioned Warrington borough council to conduct some research into the barriers for us collecting pre-proceedings data, because it is less tangible, clear and uniform than the data that is in the family justice system. That is a gap that we are looking to fill. We are actively considering how we can collect that data in a proportionate way that works for local authorities and addresses the gap, but does not generate undue workload for them. I wanted to bring out one further thing that the DFE has invested in, which I have not managed to bring before the Committee yet: we secured £10 million of shared outcomes fund investment at the autumn 2023 spending review and have invested that in three pilots. The most significant was the designated family judge Trailblazer pilot, which was looking at really specific interventions to tackle delay in specific local areas. There were others around suspected head injury and pre-case management hearings too. All those are designed to tackle exactly the issues that my colleagues in the Ministry of Justice have been talking about, in relation to the slowness, efficiency and productivity of the system itself. I am very keen that, as part of the ongoing children’s social care transformation agenda, we look far more at the outcomes. We have lots of active work on care leavers, for example, and it links to that. We know that too many of these children who have really difficult adverse experiences go on to have really difficult lives later on. All our interventions are seeking to turn that around. It is exactly the same principle as the Pathfinders: trying to bring all the activity early on in the life cycle of the child, so that their experience is far better.

I am going to ask some concluding questions about value for money. It was quite surprising, when we read the Report, to read that there is no clear identification of what the overall costs to the system are. Everyone knows their own bits and pieces, but there is no overall cost. How can we assess whether the whole system is offering value for money?

First of all, every part of the system has an AO. We are all accounting officers for our own bit of the system. I know your question is about overall, but this is inherently complex. It sits over multiple Departments, at national and local level. Our systems are designed so that we work together and try to create the best value for money that we can from the different systems, but it is inherently complex. We have also talked about and used as a demonstration how the fact that it sits in different parts of the system has not stopped us from changing where we allocate the resources where we need to. Pathfinder is our example of that. We have started with what the best outcome for the child is, how we can do this differently and the fact that resources sit in different parts of the system. The other thing is that we can all account for different bits of the system but, as the NAO Report also says, for example, in Nick’s jurisdiction, public and private share different resources. We certainly would not want to make the system less efficient in order just to get one number, as it were. We try to have the best possible use of resources across the system, but that means that they are shared, and it is not easy to isolate them just to this system.

It would be helpful to know what they are.

The report clearly says what they are for each individual bit of the system. There are some bits of the system where they say it is very difficult to isolate a single number because they share resources, but we do that to get best value.

We are working to improve the value. It is hard to know if improvement is achieving best value if we do not know what the cost of the totality is in the first place.

We do not know in totality, but we do know every bit of the system. For example, when we rolled out Pathfinder, we had a specific fiscal assessment of what we think it has done to the cost in the system.

If you are bringing in an improvement, you need to know its impact on different parts of the system in order to get the total impact.

We can absolutely tell you the impact on the bit of the system very clearly.

You think you have a grasp somewhere of the totality of what is being spent and how changes to any part of that will impact other parts and the total.

Yes, and Pathfinder has proved that we do exactly that. We know how it has changed the impact on different parts of the system, what will be needed and so on, but it does sit across multiple systems and there are shared resources.

We are talking here primarily about the costs of the administration of the justice system, but the costs that I am more worried about, from a children’s social care perspective, are the long-term, lifetime costs of poor outcomes for these children. Again, we have some very good assessment of what those are and that is how we have managed to secure the £2 billion of additional investment that I referred to earlier. It is cheaper to invest more in helping those children and families earlier on, rather than paying the price of them having poor lifetime outcomes.

One of the challenges in the NAO Report, which you have agreed to, is that very often pilots and reviews looking at different ways of doing things have been trialled in strongly performing areas, with maybe not much thought given to how they might be rolled out and whether they would be more or less effective in the poorer-performing areas. Is that a fair challenge?

That is a very fair challenge, but we would defend why we do that. Landing a change on an already very difficult system is a difficult thing to do. We have sought to test it in areas that are more stable and then think about how we can prepare the more difficult areas for it. It is almost certainly true that there will be different lessons to learn. For example, rolling it out in the midlands will give us a bit more indication about how we then get to an area like London or the south-east. It is deliberate on our part to try to learn the lessons on the more stable part of the system before we get to more difficult parts. It is also a fair assessment. We do not argue with it.

On the DFE-led Trailblazers, we deliberately chose the areas that were struggling most, because that was more of an intervention to assess what issues were causing delay and then to remedy them. It is a bit different from the reforms that Amy is referring to there. We deliberately chose those that were furthest behind.

The other thing that was said in the Report was that there are a lot of initiatives going on—we are not saying that people are standing there doing nothing—but sometimes those initiatives are being done in parallel, and you therefore cannot pick out what the particular effect is of any one initiative compared to another. Is that a fair criticism?

It is a fair observation. I do not know if it is a fair criticism. I will just say why I do not think it is a fair criticism, implying that we should do something different. The system that we are talking about, as we have said many times today, is so complex that, even if we artificially slowed down these pilots so that we did one thing at a time—which would then pray against the timeliness and the rolling out more quickly that we have talked about—society and other factors would change. That would mean it would be very difficult to isolate this simply anyway. Our approach has been to deliberately try to do the things we think will make the most difference, in parallel where we can, and then try to do process evaluations, financial evaluations and so on to try to work out exactly what happened. Even if we did things sequentially, saying that this was a direct cause and effect would be extremely difficult, because the system is so complex.

Do you think it is challenging that there is no one accounting officer for the whole of the system?

I am very happy to answer that. It is certainly more challenging than if we were in one simple system, but nearly all the most complex problems in society will go across multiple Government Departments. That is the nature of the challenge of these very difficult things that we all seek to improve in Government. There is not any way to artificially make this into one person’s responsibility.

To add to that from a DFE perspective, if we had competing or contrasting objectives and we were seeking to do something different, it would be really problematic, but I genuinely do not see that at all. If we are all driving in the same direction and working in partnership, I am not sure that that one element determines the outcome and the success of the system.

On that reassuring point, we can probably thank the witnesses for coming this afternoon. Clearly, as has been said repeatedly, it is a complex service that requires more than one Department and multiple organisations. We have identified areas where the witnesses have accepted that improvements are needed. We will be reflecting on those as a Committee after the meeting and then coming back to you with a report and our findings. Thank you very much for coming. An uncorrected transcript of this hearing will be published on the Committee’s website in the coming days. We will then consider the evidence and produce a report in due course. [1] Letter from the Chief Executive of HM Courts and Tribunals Service relating to the oral evidence session held on 23 June 2025 on Improving family court services for children, 07 July 2025