The UK family court system is in a state of near total gridlock.
In London, the average family court case lasted 53 weeks in 2024 and 2025, and 32 per cent of public law cases had at least one hearing cancelled in the same time period, according to a report by the government’s Public Accounts Committee. What is more, over 4,000 children were involved in public and private law cases open for longer than 100 weeks in December 2024. The report cited a lack of district judges and social workers as a key reason for these delays and also said that ‘delays in cases weigh heavily on children, in particular for domestic abuse victims’.
In an aim to tackle the backlog, as well as its effects on families, the government has introduced a pilot scheme, ‘Child Focused Courts’, which aims to put the wellbeing of children at the centre of divorce proceedings – and speed up the judicial process.
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The scheme was first tested in Dorset and North Wales from February 2022 and is now live in 10 areas of the UK, including West Yorkshire, Hampshire and Birmingham.
Before the trial of this child-centric model, proceedings would revolve around competing accounts from both parents, which often became adversarial. Children’s wishes, feelings and, in more serious cases, allegations of abuse, were not explored until much later in the process. Under the new framework, a social worker from the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service (Cafcass) meets with the children and parents separately before the first divorce hearing. The social worker’s findings are then summarised for the court, in an approach designed to offer time savings compared with the gradual fact-finding process of the existing system.
‘It’s transformative in terms of how the courts have been dealing with children during divorce,’ says Laura Clapton, co-founder of the Leeds-based family law firm Consilia Legal, who has been working within the Child Focused Court framework since it was introduced to West Yorkshire in June 2025.
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Initial Ministry of Justice data is promising; in some areas, the average number of hearings per case has fallen from five to between 1.3 to 1.4 during the pilot.
However, with high speed does not necessarily come smooth sailing. ‘In West Yorkshire, there are a lot of practitioners that are concerned that cases may be being decided without the level of evidence and investigation as previously,’ says Clapton.
A fact-finding hearing (a court procedure that determines the truth of allegations) is often integral to unravelling the full story during the most serious family law cases, according to Anita Guha KC, a leading family law barrister who regularly represents vulnerable adults and young people in court. Guha believes that, with the child-focused model leading to fewer cases going to hearings, instances of abuse could slip through the cracks.
‘Victims of domestic abuse need to have adequate space and time to process the trauma that they’ve been through and speak about the abuse,’ says Guha. ‘It is unrealistic to expect somebody to open up and confide during the first interview. A rapport has to be built with their lawyers and it may be that they’ve never spoken about these issues with anyone before.’
The child-focused model has not yet been used in London’s family courts, which see longer delays than anywhere else in the UK. When the scheme does finally reach the capital, it may help to clear some of the backlog of cases, says Thomas Brownrigg, a family lawyer and mediator at the firm Goodman Ray, but cases in the capital tend to be different from those in the regions.
‘The danger of rolling things out in certain parts of the country is that family law decision-making can be quite location-centric,’ says Brownrigg. ‘I work in London and Brighton, and the way things work in the capital is very different to how Brighton goes about things.’
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London is the epicentre of the UK for HNW divorces and welcomes a number of ‘divorce tourists’ from across the globe, Brownrigg notes. An international dimension often results in more complicated proceedings, which will provide a sterner test for the child-focused model. The combination could also defeat the time-saving aims of the scheme, he adds.
For the scheme to be more effective than the current system, adequate funding is paramount. ‘To cut to the chase, Cafcass is really under-resourced and under huge pressure,’ says Brownrigg. ‘To be successful, the Child Focused Model is going to need serious training, funding and investment – something which will take a lot longer than they want it to.’
The Ministry of Justice is expanding the Child Focused Model in eight additional court areas across 2026 and 2027, including Lancashire, Cheshire, Merseyside and Northamptonshire, and has announced a £17 million investment to fund this rollout. The government aims to have the model fully implemented across all family courts in England and Wales by 2029.
