Dear David, a memo to the Norgrove Committee from the Dartington Conference 2011: the collected papers of the 2011 Dartington Hall Conference.

Hughes, Rupert

Dear David, a memo to the Norgrove Committee from the Dartington Conference 2011: the collected papers of the 2011 Dartington Hall Conference

Rt Hon Lord Justice Thorpe, William Tyzack Jordans 2011 35 [pounds sterling]

This book contains some dozen papers together with resolutions from the Interdisciplinary Family Law Conference at Dartington Hall in 2011. It therefore covers a very wide range of subjects with which this review cannot adequately deal and readers must make their own choice. However, the great interest lies in the timing in between the Interim and the Final Reports of the Family Justice Review for England and Wales, chaired by David Norgrove.

Two of the members of the Review were present and contributed, as did the President of the Family Division and Professor Munro whose report on child protection was current. Legal authors predominate but there are papers on the voice of the child, the experience of families in the court process and children's need for permanence. There are 19 Resolutions by the Conference. It is surely most unusual for a committee to be able to benefit from such authoritative views before confirming their report.

These reports together amount to many hundreds of pages. Inevitably one needs to be selective in one's comments. The Interim Report sets out a number of problems and challenges to be addressed by family justice arrangements today. How does this leading group of practitioners, policy and management people and researchers respond? The Chair's Foreword refers to broad issues: there is great strain, the delays are shocking, too many private law disputes in court, there is distrust between organisations and practitioners and a lack of management information ... The Committee aims to bring greater coherence through organisational change and better management ... to reduce duplication of scrutiny and to divert more issues away from court. Much of their report is about systems and processes and accordingly a good deal of the response is also about these. But in themselves these will not meet the challenges unless the culture and the strategy behind them are fully accepted.

Family justice needs different procedures because the purpose is different from most other uses of the courts; it is about future risks to families and children and their outcome. The judicial function is therefore different. It needs to be more forward and inquisitorial, going beyond case management and continuity and the conference seemed to accept this. It would have been nice to see a resolution on the importance of better research on outcomes and improved statistics but apart from request for feedback to the courts on outcome (Resolution 11), this is attached to the implementation of care plans rather than to outcome as such--there is not much coverage of this--but in the event, see para 25 of the Executive Summary of the Review's final report which is more positive.

Are the right cases going to court? As to public law, I am not sure on the present view from research. At one time it seemed as if this was so, partly because the authority of a court judgment was appreciated. Recent increases in applications seem to have followed high-profile cases although this does not necessarily mean that the children did not need a court order. Voluntary care arrangements are, of course, usually preferable but cannot always be sustained. The situation in private law is different and there was clearly concern at the Conference about the Review's proposals to reduce the courts' workload. Hopefully something can be achieved to leave space for more attention and more resources for public law.

When the case goes to court is the court experience good enough? There are some useful papers here about the role and contribution of the child and the experience of the family. But the predominant concern of the Review was on the time taken and complexity. The Review aimed to reduce duplication of scrutiny in two main ways: a better use of expert witnesses and a general acceptance of the detail of local authority plans. In the case of expert witnesses there is no specific Resolution but Judge Leslie Newton, in her paper, backs the recommendation for more rigorous questioning of their necessity. The proposals on care plans were less acceptable, only to be implemented (if at all) after the implementation of the Munro recommendations. This seems to me because there has always been a difficult choice between local authority responsibility for care planning, which is our present system, and the court's wish to continue to be concerned and to some extent responsible for the outcome, as in former wardship, the pilot family drug and alcohol court and some continental systems. The court does of course under our system have some responsibility, eg if the child were returned to an abusing family through lack of an order.

There is much on the problem of delay, which seems to be getting worse rather than better. Numerous efforts have been made over the years but the culture remains. As David Norgrove says in his Final Foreword, he was struck by the way in which almost every group consulted thought they should do more (judges, magistrates, social workers and expert witnesses) but hardly anyone thought they themselves should do less. As one says, the best is often the enemy of the good and I don't think this problem can easily be solved, although more information, especially locally, about what is happening might help. My view is that local management meetings (different from advisory committees) between senior local authority and judicial representatives, not only to review current cases but also to plan the future programme as it develops, are essential as in the Final Report.

If the maximum period for care proceedings of six months (with exceptions) proposed by the Review is to work, practitioners need to have confidence that it is achievable. Judge Lesley Newton, in looking at her cases, thought that it should be except where the decision was provisional involving the testing out of a placement with a parent or family members under an Interim Order. For me this raises the question whether either the application was pre mature on the part of the local authority or the court should have made a full order, which could of course later be cancelled.

Those readers looking for specific implications for adoption will not find a great deal. The comment by Judge Leslie Newton that adoption panels add little to most public law cases was transferred into Resolution 12 and the Review has subsequently confirmed their view that panels should not need to consider suitability for a child whose case is before the court.

This brings me to the final and probably most important area--the lack of confidence and sometimes disrespect between the professions as well as between the organisations which the Review has emphasised. This was to be commended as an interdisciplinary conference and the system is of course interdisciplinary with the problems that ensue from this. Mutual respect can only come from improved professionalism in all quarters and it is to be hoped that the Munro proposals for social workers will contribute to this. Management in all areas should promote it.

To conclude, this is an interesting and probably unique opportunity for those intereted in family law to review where we are on a wide range of issues. The papers in the main do not directly address the challenges set out above but they do contain a lot of relevant material for tackling them. I hope that in this short review I have covered enough points to whet the appetite. To anyone working in children's services who attempts to follow the various themes through, I wish good fortune.

Rupert Hughes is Fellow, Centre for Social Policy, Darlington, UK. He chaired the official group on the Children Bill 1989 foer the Department of Health