Haven’t seen this confirmed from any Government source but the ultra reliable Pink Tape blog broke this story yesterday.
Of course this JR will be unsuccessful, given how administrative law works.
One thing the lawyers need to look at is how many CAFCASS people are salaried and how many are self employed? I find little in the way of business sense of any self employed people being used to provide similar services to salaried staff. That is a systemic flaw if every there was one!
The ‘No Delay’ principle has only ever been aspirational, but delay could be greatly reduced if fact finding hearings were held within 6 weeks. That doesn’t require any CAFCASS input so lets be creative here and start expediting fact finding hearings! Remember where you heard it first!
In all seriousness, some CAFCASS regions have been slaughtered by OFSTED, and the processes get tinkered with, but the people remain, as does the ‘culture’. Rudeness, lack of anything resembling continuous professional development, unwillingness to allow interviews to be recorded, lack of anything approaching reasoning skills, cognitive bias, gender bias, reliance on outdated research and a general inability to stop lionizing mothers and demonizing fathers. The sooner GB has an Equality Commission and Equality Laws such as Section 75 of the Northern Ireland Act 1998 the better as there is little in the way of any redress for men under CAFCASS’ complaints procedure.
From the comments to this post in the Pink Tape blog I would love to know where you guys and girls are getting all these super CAFCASS officers? I imagine you must be all acting for mums!
Surely the mix of salaried and self-employed FCAs is the result of cobbling CAFCASS together from – I am led to believe – no fewer than 117 separate agencies. What is madness is that they don’t seem to have moved on from 2001.
You must log in to post a comment. Log in now.