By Lara Feigel
Lara Feigel is the author of four highly acclaimed works of cultural history and a novel. Professor of Modern Literature and Culture at King’s College London and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she reviews regularly for theGuardianand contributes to a range of BBC radio programmes. Most recently, Feigel appeared as a lead contributor in the landmark BBC 1 cultural history of the interwar years, Art that Made Us, and she wrote and presented a programme about Doris Lessing for the Radio 4 prestigious Archive Hourslot.
Part One
September. Summer has drawn to a soggy close and I’ve woken up early to drive to the seaside in the rain. It turns out, though, that the Bournemouth family court is on the outskirts of the city so there are no seagulls here, and no taste of salt to be had on the damp wind that lashes against me. I walk through the car park to the large, flat municipal building whose substantial portico announces itself to the world as something grander and more significant to society than the office blocks it otherwise resembles.
Since 2022, Bournemouth has been one of the inaugural Pathfinder courts. These were set up in response to the 2020 Harm Panel Report, where a group of academics and judicial stakeholders condemned how the courts handled cases involving domestic abuse. The report, authored by Rosemary Hunter, Mandy Burton and Liz Trinder, found that across the Family Court system, ‘abuse is systematically minimised’ and children’s voices often ‘go unheard or are muted’, and that parents were placed ‘in opposition on what is often not a level playing field in cases involving domestic abuse’. One response to the report has been these new courts, and Rosemary Hunter has played a role in helping to set them up. She’s told me that she thinks they’re making a genuine difference. ‘What’s been effective,’ she says, is ‘speaking to the child, and getting information about the family at a very early stage’. This means that there’s more information available to the court from the start, and they have rarely felt the need to commission the reports from the so-called ‘expert’ psychologists that too many courts rely on. She feels that there have been fewer allegations of parental alienation made in Pathfinder courts, and fewer dramatic and punitive changes of residence ordered by judges as a result.
I’ve long been curious about these Pathfinder courts, and so I am glad to have been invited to observe a day here by HHJ Christopher Simmonds, the Designated Family Judge for Dorset. He meets me at reception, just after I’ve gone through the extreme bag check that is always a feature of day in court, and takes me for a tour of the building. When the court became a Pathfinder court they renovated the building, so there are totally separate entrances and waiting areas here for victims of domestic abuse, meaning that there’s no danger they will encounter their abuser during the bag check or waiting to go into the hearing. He takes me through these separate corridors and then for the first time in over a year of court reporting, I find myself in the judge’s chambers, offered a cup of tea, overlooked by the many vast photographs of his beloved dogs on the walls. Simmonds seems delighted to have me there, as a journalist and academic – delighted to have the chance to have his court observed.
Simmonds has been running this Pathfinder court since soon after it started. He tells me that when it was launched, in February 2022, his predecessor who had been a champion of the new scheme left a month in. At that point they were 50% down on judges and legal advisors, and had over 600 open cases, running over from the old court system. As in so many courts, it wasn’t unusual to have cases going back three or four years, where the final hearing had already been adjourned four times. Simmonds couldn’t see how this could possibly work.
But it turned out that with a lot of overtime and a lot of determination and commitment and united effort from colleagues, they could get on top of it, and that now his court has far less of a backlog of cases than any of the conventional courts. This is because, according to their internal calculations, the new system reduces court time by 50%. Rather than the usual line up of directions hearing, First Hearings Dispute Resolution Appointment (FHDRA) and then fact finding or final hearing, judges here work with legal advisers on the gatekeeping and then often only attend a single, short hearing, after the case has already been managed and directed. At present, they have no cases from 2023 in the system, only 13 cases from 2024, and just over 200 live and open cases, of the 700 or so cases that come through the court every year. They have free court days every week that can be used for emergency hearings, and are taking on some of the backlog from other courts.
Three years in, Simmonds is absolutely converted to the new system. He is sure that Pathfinder courts make the children themselves and their views much more central to its workings. In the conventional family courts, the initial Cafcass screening letter provides only minimal information. By the time the parents come for their first directions hearing, after eight weeks, no one has seen the children or done a welfare assessment, and the judge is required to make urgent orders with very limited information.
In the Pathfinder courts, by contrast, new applications are sent immediately to gatekeeping, where legal advisors determine whether they are urgent and commission a ‘Child Impact Assessment’ if necessary, which will take a maximum of 8 weeks. So 8 weeks after the application has been received, they are listed for their second gatekeeping assessment. At this point the judge or legal advisor assigned the case has access to the welfare report and understands what the case is about. If there are allegations of violence or abuse, the parents are now required to make statements detailing these and respond to the other parent’s allegations. Then they come to court, where the judge already has a sense of what these children’s lives are like: how they are doing at school and how their parents are getting on and functioning in the world.
Simmonds wants the Pathfinder model to be rolled out to courts everywhere and can’t see any reason why they shouldn’t be. They aren’t more expensive to run, once the initial transition has been made. Ultimately, they are cheaper, because court time with judges is reduced and there are fewer returning families coming back to the court year after year.
My first case of the day is with Simmonds’ colleague, District Judge Michael Veal. I meet Veal after he’s just spent an hour running the court’s drug and alcohol court. When parents have issues with substance misuse, they are referred to this daily session, and come in every two or three weeks to chat to the judge. Veal tells me that they often talk about their children, about football, and about what they are doing to address their problems and how they feel it’s going. The hope is that courts and judges become more appealing, and less authoritarian, and that this makes the larger court process feel more collaborative and integrated into everyday life. The judges direct parents to forms of support they think might help them. And they believe that the more everyday contact of this kind the court can have with the parents, the easier it becomes for the parents to have contact with their children.
On the way to the courtroom, Veal tells me the background of the hearing we’re about to go into, which involves a young primary school age girl, who I’ll call Amy, whose father hasn’t returned her from contact because he was warned the mother had been using cocaine.
Last week, the parents came in for an urgent hearing, and a prohibitive steps order was made stopping the mother removing Amy from the father’s care. Hampshire county council has told the court that they’ve had previous concerns about the mother’s drug use, and at one point had considered issuing care proceedings. These concerns had fallen away, until last week, when the father reported his current worries, and they began another assessment. Currently, the mother has been ordered to have supervised contact with her daughter, supervised by her own parents. She’s also been directed to have a hair strand test, but since the hearing last week her solicitor has written to the court to say that she has indeed been using cocaine, and wants to postpone the testing. Veal has timetabled a Child Impact Assessment, due at the end of October, and Hampshire council are also doing a child assessment. Today’s hearing will concern what’s going to happen meanwhile.
It’s a small courtroom and there are just four of us in it: the parents are both representing themselves. The mother is informally dressed, with her black shirt rolled up; the father is sharp-suited, with a pink tie put on for the occasion. The mother is ready, from the start, to be as open with the court as she can, aware that this is going to be her best chance for getting her daughter back.
‘I struggle with depression and anxiety,’ she says. She used drugs in April and May after there was a death in the family. ‘It took me back in my recovery, I was having a really hard time. It’s not an excuse. And then I used again four weeks ago.’
She’s going to need to do hair strand testing, to show the concentrations in each segment over time. It’s going to be expensive, so Veal suggests extending the deadline for the testing beyond the fortnight currently ordered, so that she can apply for legal aid to pay for it. He’s already checked the father’s means and found that he doesn’t have enough to pay.
She wants to push on, and pay for it herself, hoping that this will mean she can get her daughter back as soon as possible.
‘I’ve never put my kids in danger,’ she says. ‘I love them dearly. I am a really good mum.’ At home she still has one younger child, who’s been going to school throughout, and is missing Amy. The siblings met at school yesterday and the younger one broke down in tears when they had to say goodbye.
Veal suggests that she might be better off waiting at least a month or two to do the drug test, so that she can prove to the court that she’s been clean for long enough by the time she’s tested that a new pattern of abstinence can be established. In the meantime, he wants her to be able to see Amy, and is prepared for this contact to be supervised by family members, rather than involving expensive and inaccessible contact centres. She says that her brother and his wife have said they could supervise contact every weekend, and that her brother is fully aware of her drug use, and was the one who pushed her into recovery. Indeed, it was her brother who called Amy’s father and told him that his sister was using again. The father confirms this.
‘He phoned me and told me to get Amy out of her house,’ he says.
‘He didn’t say those words in the last hearing,’ the mother says, defensively. ‘That’s changed from what you said last week.’
But the judge isn’t interested in who said what and when. He wants to come up with a plan, and he asks the father if he’s happy for the mother’s brother and parents to supervise the contact. So a plan is made, but the mother wants more reassurance of a possible future than she’s been given.
‘I understand I brought this on myself,’ she says, ‘I’m happy to work with you guys, as long as I’ve got a goal to work for. Will I get my daughter back eventually?’
‘I can’t make promises,’ Veal says. He doesn’t have the evidence yet. He orders the hair strand testing for six weeks’ time, and arranges a hearing straight after – the benefit of the free diaries in this court is that hearings can be scheduled according to the needs of the case, rather than of the needs of the court.
The mother has another request. A couple of days before the next hearing, she’s booked a holiday. It’s their first ever family holiday abroad; the school has agreed to it, and Amy has been looking forward to it. She’s got her suitcase out ready to go, and her holiday dresses chosen.
Veal and the father both look distressed.
‘It’s being taken out of the country,’ the father says. ‘Which needs to be based on you being able to stay clean.
‘I will, there’s no doubt,’ she pleads.
‘That’s why we’re here,’ the father says, rightly.
Veal pauses to reflect. He could bring the testing forward. But he has Amy’s longer term safety and future to consider. He isn’t prepared to change the schedule.
‘I think for the reasons I gave last week, the risk is too high at this stage,’ he says. ‘It’s disappointing for Amy. But on balance I don’t think I would agree to her going on holiday.’
Published 9 April.