Thackray Williams

A new law for children?
The Coalition Government has announced plans to shake up the arrangements for contact with children after parents split up. They say  that the Children Act should be changed so that it is expressly written into the Act that it is every child’s right to grow up knowing and having contact with both parents and the wider families on both sides, including grandparents.   This announcement was made even though the Government’s own Advisory Committee’s (the Norgrove Report) had advised against changing the Law so as to give both parents “equal access”.   So what are the issues?

When parents split up mum will normally have day-to-day care of the children and dad will usually see the kids at weekends. In most cases this is sorted out direct between the parents and it works well. But in a minority of cases they can’t agree arrangements and that’s when the law gets involved. A lot of dads in these cases have felt that the operation of the legal system is biased against them and that mums can abuse the system to stop any meaningful relationship between dad and the child continuing after the parents separate. Consequently fathers have taken to various publicity stunts to highlight their predicament over the last 10-15 years. 

Many lawyers say that the law doesn’t need to be changed though because the courts already take the view that children need contact with both parents. They say that equal time with each parent is not feasible in most cases and that giving dad a legal right to “equal access” might not be in the best interests of the child, and the child’s right should trump dad’s rights.   Where they tried this sort of amendment to the Law in Australia, it produced more cases coming before the courts rather than less, and they are now reconsidering the change.

 
However, the current way in which courts intervene in disputed contact cases does not work well.  Legal Aid rewards litigation rather than settlement.  Adversarial court proceedings exacerbate acrimony between the parties.  Verifying safety issues is ineffective and slow.  The law’s delay often undermines the father/child relationship to the extent that the court may take the view that it is no longer in the best interests of the child to allow contact.

Court orders are never the best way of regularizing personal relationships, which is what we are talking about here. The Court system is now more directed towards providing both parents with information and guidance, pointing them in the direction of Mediation so that they learn to sort out their own problems.  And if the government’s plans to abolish Legal Aid for all Family work are passed into law we may very well see that far fewer parents will feel that the cost of going to court to sort out contact problems is affordable.

Martin Poupard is a solicitor specialising in separation, divorce and child access.  For more information telephone 020 8290 0440 or email: martin.poupard@thackraywilliams.com