Speeches by Taylor.

“Sorry, yes. By that point, it was too far gone to recover. Is that a fair assessment?”

“Apologies for reopening a conversation that we have had at length. Ed, you spoke about how you first raised concerns in March 2020, but that must have been an accumulation of problems that you had seen occurring up until that point. So that was not the first point at which problems were occurring; that was when the fir…”

“I just wanted to explore that a little. Yes, it is the role to be sceptical and ensure that the quality is there but there seems to be a bit of optimism bias that actually we figured this out, we can recover this. But by the point it dropped to 16% and the period of being able to weight the data to fill in the gaps ran…”

“Earlier this week I was contacted by a long-suffering commuter using Worcester Park station. She wrote: “As a teacher my days are already demanding, often filled with pressure, high energy, and very little downtime. Sadly, commuting to and from work now feels just as stressful. Trains during peak hours are frequently s…”

“10. How much funding she plans to provide to increase the frequency of trains from stations in Sutton and Cheam constituency.”

“It is four years today since the Apple Daily ceased publication, and Jimmy Lai still languishes in Hong Kong’s Stanley Prison. It is worth noting his name and encouraging the Foreign Secretary to raise his case as often as he can. It is welcome to see in the statement that we are “strengthening our response to transnat…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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 cas…”

“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.”

“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 spend…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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, ther…”

“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 …”

“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…”

“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 th…”

“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 t…”

“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 commi…”

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