Couldn’t have put it better myself. This letter from the ALC published in today’s Times is spot on.
POSTSCRIPT: More superlatives – this time it’s implosion rather than meltdown (per Wall LJ).
Joining the dots…
Last week the Public Accounts Committee published a damning report telling us that family justice was failing...
With respect to Piers Pressdeee (have I spelt that correctly?) and Alan Bean, arguing for more investment simply isn’t realistic: it won’t be forthcoming. All of us who work in the public sector have to realise that whatever our problems we need to solve them more imaginatively and radically than simply by begging for more funds: the money isn’t there.
What there is, in the case of family law, are a great many ideas which haven’t been tried yet, and which won’t cost more than the existing system. They might even cost less.
Incidentally, I think using the cases of Peter Connelly and Khyra Ishaq in this context is in poor taste. I doubt that a guardian or a solicitor could have saved them when an army of other state employees failed to do so. What they really needed, like all children, was a pair of decent, loving parents, instead of the dysfunctional squalor they were born into, and which the last government defended on the grounds that families come in ‘all shapes and sizes’.
Spot on indeed.