We all now live in a world where we are connected by technology more than ever before. And yet, communicating with the Family Court has never been more difficult.
Once upon a time, not so very long ago, if I needed to speak to the court office about a case, I would simply pick up the phone and call it. A court officer would answer my question and could tell me what I needed to know. I could very easily find out whether a date had been set for a hearing, or whether the other side had filed their witness statement or if the judge had approved a consent order. If I needed to start an application urgently, I could walk to the court and go up the counter in the court office, hand over my application and a cheque for the court fee and the court would deal with it.
That now seems like a very long time ago. Communicating with the court office either over the phone, in writing or face to face is now a deeply frustrating and above all else a spectacularly slow and inefficient process.
Over the past decade or so, HM Courts & Tribunals Service have closed court offices and increasingly tried to centralise them. For example, the court office at (what is now called) Ipswich County Court and Family Hearing Centre closed a few years ago. No paperwork is processed by the court staff there. Colchester County and Family Court was closed. All applications and paperwork are now processed at the Chelmsford Justice Centre. Turning up in person at the court office without a counter appointment is not allowed.
If this streamlining had resulted in greater efficiency, it could be easily justified. However, things have just got slower. If you call the court now, you are placed in a call waiting queue to talk someone in a centralised call centre. You wait for 30 minutes on a good day. I waited for well over an hour and half on one occasion. When you get through, often the call centre staff cannot assist much. They do their best, but the court’s ramshackle system makes it difficult for them. Court officers used to be able to riffle through a filing cabinet to find the answer, but now it is all electronic, and they are not based in the court building. They can only tell what they see on their computer screen. Often, they cannot tell me anything that I do not already know.
Emails that have been sent to the court often have not reached their destination. For example, Chelmsford Justice Centre has an email system where you must phrase the title of the email in precisely the right way and the email, and any attached document, should then automatically be filed in the right place. My experience of this is that sometimes it works and sometimes it does not. It is not at all unusual to turn up for hearings and to find that your email with the hearing bundle (which contains all the relevant documents for the hearing) attached to it cannot be found by the court. I recall one telephone hearing during COVID where I had to interrupt the court at the start of the hearing to point out that we were missing the other side’s solicitor; the court had not called him as it could not find the notice that he had filed placing himself on the court record. The court telephoned him and he joined the hearing. It then transpired that the court had also not seen my email with the attached bundle, nor had it received a later email with a draft order for the court to approve.
There have been improvements over the last two or three years. Portals for issuing divorce applications and both contested and agreed financial remedy applications now exist where we can upload the documents and be confident that they have been received by the court. However, emails to the court are still often not answered and are often overlooked. There is a portal for issuing applications about children, but this stretches no further than the issue stage. Once the application is underway, everything else that we send to the court has to be emailed. HMCTS is trialling a new portal for child arrangements applications in Swansea, and we are told that, once it is confident that it is working properly, it will be rolled out throughout the country. These online portals are a huge improvement, although they are not yet perfected.
It is difficult to avoid the obvious conclusion that a failure to invest in decent IT systems in the past are a significant cause of this. Another reason will be the government’s withdrawal of legal aid in most family cases (save where the applicant alleges that they are victim of domestic abuse). People’s inability to get free legal advice at any early stage means that far too many of them rush off to court because they have not had advise from a solicitor that they should try to resolve the dispute by negotiation or mediation, or because they have unrealistic expectations. The withdrawal of legal aid was a massive false economy; the burden has fallen on the Family Court.
The family justice system’s problems are not limited to difficulties communicating with the court. Delays are endemic throughout the system. It can take months before we receive hearing dates. For example, in June 2022 I was acting in a financial remedy case where we arrived at court to discover that the hearing had been cancelled a month beforehand, but nobody had told us. Nevertheless, we used the time at court to agree steps (known as directions) that we could ask the court to order that we take, so that we could move forward to the next hearing. The court took almost 2 months to approve the directions order and then referred it to the listing office to set a date for the next hearing. I waited and waited and eventually summoned up the strength to call the court and find out whether the court date has been set yet. When I eventually got through, I was told that the order had only recently been sent to the listing office – which then would take 16 weeks to set a court date. Why it takes the best part of 4 months to put an appointment in the court diary is beyond me; I can only assume that the court does not know whether there will be a judge available that day (many of the judges who act in this cases are part-time Deputy District Judges). The hearing eventually took place in April 2023, a staggering 10 months later.
These delays cause enormous problems. Parents spend months without being allowed any contact with their children. Financial applications drift on for ever. Assets rise or fall in value, requiring revaluations. Hearings are cancelled at very short notice and the parties given a new court date months later.
These problems are yet another reason why people should use alternatives to court, such as negotiation, mediation, collaborative law, or arbitration to resolve disputes wherever possible. However, those alternatives all require both sides to agree to resolve that way. There are inevitably many cases where those methods are not suitable, for example, where there has been domestic abuse, addictions, or mental health issues. There are also cases where they are not suitable because one party won’t be sensible or where the process has broken down. The government has proposed that mediation should be made compulsory, but this seems unrealistic; forcing people to mediate who do not wish to do so will not work. Some people need to have the decision made for them. They need the court to deliver justice efficiently and swiftly.
17 June 2023
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