If you are as old as me you will remember what this is quoting. If you are not, here it is. It came from a time when adverts were an art form in themselves, a little microcosm of society, of life’s important moments and rites of passage and expected route – coming of age (exam results), love and marriage, domestic bliss and raising children (Hands that do dishes feel as soft as your face, aaaahhh Bisto!), aging and legacy (Fly Fishing by JR Hartley). Oh, and mortal danger from strangers at the swings (Charlie says), electricity pylons and Nic O-teen.

My kids don’t have to make all their phonecalls from the phone wired into the wall in the hall, or hang up at 59 minutes and redial to take advantage of BT’s 10p rate for calls less than an hour. But we do have exams in our house this year. I went today to a house clearance to rescue some items belonging to a recently passed couple that couldn’t be kept, hoping to give them a little bit more life and love, after their owner had passed. I don’t know the owners, but shades of JR Hartley nonetheless.

Time passes, life cycles on and comes full circle.

And so it is that in family law I sometimes have a sense of deja vu, like I’ve seen this bit of the cycle before.

The family justice system is not a system. It needs to become more coherent. Where have I heard that before? Oh yes, the Norgrove Review 15 years ago. When my own almost-adults were tiny wee things.

The Family Court is not the right place for separated parents. Most of them don’t need to be there. That one is played on a continuous loop, like the beep in ‘Lost’. One Government after another.

Courts and lawyers are ‘adversarial’. They drive conflict: An old favourite. Often hanging in the air and floating between the lines, but always around. And sometimes the quiet part (lawyers are a problem – lawyers are the problem is said out loud).

‘We must reduce cost and delay’. That one is like tinnitus. Buzzing away in an insistent high pitch even as you try to switch off, worsening as stress levels rise and sleep deprivation increases.

Divert, squeeze, reduce.

Of course, nobody can argue with this mantra. Diverting families from court, reducing delay and increasing efficiency are all good things.

Divert, squeeze, reduce.

Divert people from court, from legal advice and support, from judicial oversight and protection in law. Divert from nasty lawyers. You don’t need them anyway. Just sort it out. Simple.

Reduce timescales, case volumes, complexity, numbers of hearings, costs.

What about the squeeze?

Squeeze every case into a smaller box, shorter, more concise documents, smaller bundles, shorter time estimates, fewer hearings.

Everything must be done outside the courtroom doors so the case can be contained, progressed, resolved. Within timescale. Tick! Next!

Squeeze the lawyers.

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Efficiency costs. It isn’t free, even if nobody is paying for it with money.

More efficiency is achieved by more work by lawyers. To make hearings shorter, to make every hearing count. All for the same fee.

The cost is invisible (for now) because it is absorbed by the lawyers, who have done more and more and more work for 30 years without a single pay rise (not even for inflation and not even to reinstate the 10% taken off fees in 2012). And it works because it is easy for everyone to pretend they don’t notice that efficient, short hearings can only be achieved by hour after hour of work done late into the evenings and at weekends, routinely and for free. This is not an accident – it is structural, cultural, entrenched. The funding system ‘sees’ only work done in court. The judges conveniently forget that for every pithy 3 page summary many hours have been spent and many thousands of pages digested by someone else. Those who issue rules and guidance don’t trouble themselves with tawdry funding issues before creating new demands and expectations, and those who are responsible for funding consider only the tip of the iceberg (the length of the hearing, the size of the bundle) without regard to the actual work required. Nobody sees it because they choose not to see it. And because barristers have a conscience and do what is needed in the interests of their client, even if it is at the expense of their wellbeing, their family life and their bank balance. Within reason…the system trades on – depends upon – our goodwill.

The cost is invisible until the lawyers stop coming. Until they stop paying for efficiency with their own emotional capital, or stop turning up at all. Then the cost will be met by vulnerable families. The ones who really needed a lawyer, to guide them, to speak for them, to protect them. To test the evidence, to challenge the powerful or the abusive, to ask and to say what others dare not ask, or cannot say – to help the judge to protect safety and promote welfare and make sound decisions. To avoid unnecessary issues, and to support the resolution of unavoidable ones.

What are the rewards that lawyers, and that the family courts get for working harder and longer, and for supporting the courts to operate more quickly, more leanly and more efficiently? They get no pay rise for 30 years. They get ignored when the Government conducts a review of civil legal aid. They get told that sitting days have been reduced and that they now need to turn up the dial again in order to fit the workload into the resources available. More unpaid work in the name of efficiency. Are we turkeys and is it Christmas?

There will be a new Family Justice Strategy published by Government soon. It is easy to predict what it will say. Divert, squeeze, reduce. Front-loading is the phrase du jour. Sort it out before the lawyers can get to it and complicate things with their wasteful, resource hungry justice and equity. And even if these things are not said outright, the message will be in what is not said: you can’t have a functioning family justice system – you can’t have family justice – without properly funded courts and lawyers.

Maureen was right: You can divert, reduce and squeeze as much as you like. But people will always need plates, and food to put on them. Families will always need family courts. Not all families, hopefully not many of them. But when a baby is inexplicably broken, a parent is incapable or a child is unsafe, or when someone is accused of heinous abuse and at risk of losing their child forever, then they need a family court. And society needs courts to keep children safe from abusive or neglectful parents, to keep one parent safe from another, and to keep whole families safe from an over zealous state.

If social services wanted to take away your child tomorrow on the basis of suspicion I bet you’d want a lawyer and a court then.

So people will always need a family court, however much they are squeezed. You don’t need ‘an ology’ to work that out. And nor do you need an ology to know that a plate is no use to a hungry man if there is nothing to put on it.

At the end of the day, you can divert all the ‘easy’ cases to mediation or parenting support, but what about the ones you can’t divert? They need lawyers. Experienced, skilled lawyers who will put in the hours and do a rigorous job. And if we want those lawyers to pitch up we have to feed them. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

A skilled family lawyer doesn’t drive conflict, they steer a case to consensual resolution or an alternative forum, where they can – and where they cannot they drive a case to an efficient and fair judicial conclusion. Without us there will be more and longer, messier cases, more repeat application to court, more injustice and poorer outcomes for children.

The family lawyers of the future are looking elsewhere for their means of survival, because they see that the system does not value them (see the comments on my previous post here for two examples). Instead, it blames them for conflict and takes for granted and exploits their goodwill and sense of justice. The centre cannot hold for much longer. After 30 years it is time we were valued for our contribution.

#FamilyValued