It is a very bad time to be a vulnerable child at risk of abuse and neglect. Not only are social work vacancies running at record levels – 12% nationally and almost 33% in some London boroughs – but Cafcass, the service charged with looking after the interests of children in family proceedings, is in meltdown.

As a child in the care system in London, you could wait four to six months before a children’s guardian is allocated by Cafcass. That means the court has no independent advice from the guardian – an experienced social work expert – and the child has no one independent with whom to speak about their wishes and feelings.

Can you imagine what that sort of delay means to children? Six months during which they may be inappropriately removed from home and loved ones, or remain there in an unsafe situation. There are well over 400 cases of children without guardians in London. That represents at least 1,000 children who face this appalling delay.

Cafcass’s cunning plan? Allocate these cases to employed guardians who have no capacity to undertake the work – neat, as Cafcass divests itself of responsibility and overwhelmed guardians have to answer to the court.

Experienced self-employed guardians could take cases, but Cafcass says it cannot afford them. Why not? Cafcass, almost uniquely, secured a year-on-year funding rise of 7% for 2008-2011.

Cafcass as an organisation, as distinct from the committed and hard working practitioners, has failed children. Before its inception, the London guardian panel was run by one and a half administrators, had 70 guardians, the standard of work was excellent and there were no delays. Now Cafcass employs more than 500 managers and is a bureaucratic nightmare, unable to meet its core objectives.

It is also said to be a very unhappy place to work, with guardians reportedly feeling unappreciated, pressurised, overmanaged and, in some cases, bullied. Some speak of an atmosphere of fear and intimidation. Many of the best have left. This is a terrible loss to an already depleted service. Those remaining are suffering from significant overwork, with the stress and possibility for error that this brings. In many ways, this replicates worst practice in local authority children’s services departments.

Added to this is delay at court. Judges are visibly pained by their inability to list hearings. It is not their fault. There are not enough sitting days to deal with the numbers of cases (rightly) issued by local authorities. Last week one of my cases needed an urgent two-day hearing. The judge did all he could. The earliest date he could secure was May 2010 – an eight-month delay.

Child care solicitors are paid a small fixed fee for conducting these hugely important cases. Judges are putting us under pressure to take on the role of both guardian and solicitor – in effect to do frontline social work. It is entirely understandable but makes a difficult situation worse – a marginally profitable case becomes unprofitable and breaches important and necessary professional boundaries.

This pay structure means that we often lose out. In a recent case, I calculated my average hourly rate at just over £37. Clearly, no matter how dedicated we are and how important the work, this is not sustainable.

How can we do our job – ensuring children are in a much better place at the end of the court process than at the beginning – with so many impediments? Things are desperate in the family justice system and dedicated practitioners who have spent their entire professional lives representing vulnerable children and adults are despondent.

The family justice system is like its client base: vulnerable, poor, abused and neglected. We desperately need more resources. We need a seismic change in Cafcass (reform or revolution), we need more specialist judges and we need a living wage. In terms of government spending, the family justice budget is tiny – it would fund the NHS for just four days.

We have to address these issues now. The alternative does not bear thinking about.

Christina Blacklaws, a founding partner of Blacklaws Davis, is the child care representative on the Law Society Council