Written evidence submitted by District
Judge Nicholas Crichton, Inner London Family Proceedings Court
(CAF 15)
CAFCASS INQUIRY
STAND POINT
For 15 years I was a solicitor in Wembley, North
London, dealing with what we now call child protection cases.
I have been 16 years a Stipendiary Magistrate/District Judge,
the last eight of which I have been Resident District Judge at
the Inner London Family Proceedings Court, now based at Wells
Street. Wells Street serves the 13 Inner London Boroughs, and
also receives work from some Outer London Boroughs. We receive
approximately 1,500 public law applications per year and in excess
of 1,700 private law applications. Recent figures suggest that
we make nearly 7% of all care orders made throughout all court
levels in England and Wales.
I make these submissions as an individual. I
believe that the Justices' Panel of this court will be submitting
their own submissions. I have seen a draft.
BACKGROUND
I believe that it will be difficult to understand
the submissions that need to be made without first understanding
the background to the development of the guardian ad litem service
in the 1970s and 80s.
In the 1970s parents were not parties to care
proceedings involving their children. Only one legal aid order
was available, and that order enabled the child to be represented.
Parents, not being parties, could not be represented. The legal
aid order for the child named the solicitor individually (not
his firm) and appointed him "as guardian ad litem for . .
.".
During the early 1980s the guardian ad litem
service was born and grew on the backs of very committed, experienced,
social work trained practitioners. Their role was to carry out
an independent enquiry on behalf of the child, and to ensure that
the child's wishes and feelings were brought to the court. In
the course of this work they would often identify gaps in the
work done by social services departments. They would either do
the work to plug the gaps, or identify the gaps and urge the departments
to do the work. Guardians worked in close partnership with the
solicitor for the child. They developed an extremely professional
practice delivering a quality service to the courts, to families
and to children. Panels were formed to manage the service, but
guardians retained a considerable degree of independence as to
how they worked and what work they deemed necessary to undertake
in a particular case.
Following the implementation of the Children
Act in 1991, and following my appointment as Resident District
Judge, I became a member of the Inner and North London Panel Committee,
and chaired the Committee for the last few years before CAFCASS
was formed. During this period there were occasions when the Panel
had difficulty keeping up with allocating guardians, but on those
occasions guardians responded immediately when pressed to take
on extra work. There was a very considerable sense of commitment
to the extremely vulnerable children for whom they were responsible.
At the time the Panel Committee handed over the service to CAFCASS
guardians were being allocated within twenty-four hours, seventy-two
hours at the outside in difficult cases.
PERSPECTIVE
Within these years the family justice system
developed out of all recognition. Everybody concerned with the
work developed a greater understanding of the problems of vulnerable
families and children, both in private and in public law. A greater
sense of specialism developed. The whole concept of inter-disciplinary
training developed and took off.
It is against this background that the creation
of a national body such as CAFCASS seemed to be the logical next
step, drawing in and developing best practice. To have a large,
co-ordinated, national organisation, with a louder voice for children,
seemed to make perfect sense. A lot of people had a vision of
the service developing and moving on to the next stage of a committed,
well-defined service. It was recognised that there would be teething
problems, but overall there was a sense of optimism that in this
way there could be developed a range of services to provide a
more "joined up" provision for some of the most vulnerable
people in our society. Many guardians recognise that, to a degree,
the autonomy which they had enjoyed in their working practices
could become the subject of greater control. Wells Street was
very much involved in working with the Project Team that was given
the task of setting up CAFCASS. Throughout that period assurances
were given that such control would be "light touch",
and that guardians would still have the freedom to run their own
cases and do the work they deemed to be necessary.
It is against this background that I provide
my submissions to the enquiry.
SUBMISSIONS
1. I believe that CAFCASS genuinely seek
to represent, safeguard and promote the welfare of children involved
in family court proceedings. It is my experience that the service
provided by CAFCASS is now significantly less efficient and effective
than the service which was handed over to them. Indeed, CAFCASS
themselves have expressed doubt as to whether they will ever have
the capacity to deliver the service that was being delivered prior
to 1 April 2001.
2. One of the foundation stones of the Children
Act is the concept that delay is detrimental to the interests
of children whom we seek to serve. At the risk of over-simplifying,
I believe that everybody engaged in this work should keep in mind
that two months is one% of a child's minority. If we waste time
in bringing cases to a proper conclusion, we are wasting a part
of a child's childhood which can never be recovered. At the present
time CAFCASS has something approaching two hundred cases unallocated
in the London area, and some of those cases have been waiting
for a guardian to be allocated for three months or more. This
is just not acceptable. The Kingston Office is now taking six
to eight weeks just to allocate a Children and Family Reporter
in private law cases, and sixteen weeks to provide a report—2%
of a child's childhood. This is not acceptable.
3. CAFCASS have had teething problems over
and above anything that might reasonably been anticipated. I am
not qualified to comment on the reasons, but I always felt that
the Project Team was far too small to take on the task of setting
up the organisation, and that there was a fundamental lack of
understanding of the nature of the work, and of the enormity and
importance of the task. The Board of CAFCASS therefore set out
with a disadvantage. It is my belief that they are further disadvantaged
by not have appropriate input from professionals with a more direct
understanding of the needs of the service and the needs of those
they seek to serve.
4. In these circumstances it is not surprising
that CAFCASS have been unable to consider what improvements they
might make to the services which should be offered to families
and to other key stakeholders.
5. I am not in a position to discuss how
far CAFCASS have been able to develop the skills of their staff.
I do not know what induction training their staff receive. What
I can say is that the standard of work that we see in the Family
Proceedings Court in Inner London is now noticeably lower than
it was pre-CAFCASS. That is not to say that many of the new guardians
whom we now see in our court are not conscientious. Some work
to a high standard. However, overall the work is not as good,
less thorough and the determination to "go the extra mile"
is no longer obvious. An increasing number of guardians appear
to be out of their depth, unclear about their role and responsibilities,
too inclined to say they cannot make a decision without referring
back to their supervisors. I have even heard of guardians recommending
that the court appoint an expert—an independent social worker!
The whole concept of the guardian as an experienced independent
professional overseeing the best interests of the child is being
seriously eroded by an influx of insufficiently experienced guardians,
unable or unwilling to exercise professional responsibility. It
has been suggested to me by CAFCASS that the generation of professional,
social work trained guardians who had the freedom to operate as
they thought fit in the best interests of the children they represented
is a generation now past. I believe that is looking through the
wrong end of the telescope. If you take away the freedom, if you
take away the trust, the people who might have undertaken that
work will quickly lose the incentive to do so, and will look elsewhere
to exercise their skills. This is not to say that such people
should be permitted to set their own working conditions and their
own rates of pay. It is to say that they should be trusted and
sufficiently respected to make decisions as to how they should
manage their cases.
CONCLUSION
The vision is under threat.
The tandem system of representation, whereby
a child's interests are represented by a properly accredited lawyer
working in partnership with an experienced social work professional,
is under threat. We should be striving to preserve a model which
I know to be admired and envied world-wide.
I am aware of fundamental problems. I am aware
that there are only a limited number of social workers in the
pool in which CAFCASS, among others, has to fish for its staff.
I am aware of the increasing number of public law proceedings
being filed in the courts, making further demands upon CAFCASS.
At the end of the day I suspect that, in part at least, it comes
down to money. The service which CAFCASS was set up to provide
is far too important to fail for lack of resources. The long-term
implications of failure to provide as good a service as we are
capable of providing are too serious to contemplate. We are talking
about the most vulnerable, marginalized children in our society.
We have a responsibility to get it as right as we possibly can
for those children. If we fail to do so their problems will be
reflected in future generations, at even greater cost to society.
I suspect there is a much longer-term issue.
The social work profession is insufficiently respected. They work
at the white heat/sharp end of the problems of some of the most
difficult families. They are insufficiently resourced and insufficiently
paid, insufficiently valued by the society within which they work.
As a result they do not always attract the people best suited
to the work. Of course, many are deeply committed and do excellent
work—in our courts we see the best examples as well as the
worst. However, even the best are over-worked and under-resourced,
constantly engaged in crisis management rather than having the
opportunity to gather the information, to study it and to plan
ahead for individual families and children.
Nicholas Crichton
Inner London Family Proceedings Court,
Well Street
March 2003
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