Specialist family courts needed to deal with flow of cases — report (with case study)

A specialist family court is urgently needed to deal with the current number of cases, according to the author of the latest interim Child Law Report.

Dr Carol Coulter wrote in the latest interim report that there was a “compelling case” for such courts to be put in place, as some courts were dealing with lengthy lists and some cases took days to hear, sometimes spread across a number of months.

She also said other measures were needed, such as consistent thresholds to be applied across different courts when it came to the granting of orders in relation to children, and steps to make the whole system less adversarial.