I can’t imagine that Labour’s justice team entered politics to emasculate trial by jury. Rolling out ‘child-focused’ courts seems much more ideologically congenial: the rebranding from ‘Pathfinder’ courts is presumably a ruse to appropriate a scheme that emerged under the Conservatives.
Labour can now say it pioneered ‘child-focused courts’, which will forever be technically correct.
Sir Andrew McFarlane, who shortly retires as president of the Family Division, has long championed Pathfinder. In 2024 he declared that the model ‘has turned out to be far more successful than even its most ardent supporters would have anticipated’.
The same can be said about another problem-solving justice initiative in this sector – family drug and alcohol courts. Yet, 18 years on from their foundation, there are still only 13 FDACs in England. That is despite their documented success in reuniting families and saving taxpayer money. Wales has no FDACs at all, notwithstanding the success of a Cardiff pilot.
Lord chancellor David Lammy has found £17m for Pathfinder (sic) courts. FDACs, by contrast, are ‘forced to cobble together local funding on an annual basis in order to survive’, McFarlane has lamented. Access to an FDAC is a postcode lottery.
The Family Division chief has also linked FDACs with Pathfinder as twin components of a properly joined-up family justice system. Why the former remains the poor relation is no secret. Local councils are broke and any national rollout would need trans-governmental buy-in. As McFarlane told the Commons justice committee last year: ‘The MoJ do their bit by providing the courtroom and the judge to be the facility, but it is the Home Office that must have interest in this, the Department of Health, the Department for Education.’
One firm closely involved in efforts to increase the reach of FDACs is Manchester’s Hall Brown Family Law, which in 2018 raised £280,000 to prevent the closure of the FDAC national unit. ‘Any efforts to extend problem-solving initiatives across the family justice system are to be applauded wholeheartedly,’ managing partner James Brown told me. ‘We and many others are utterly convinced that if the secretary of state was to go further [than ‘Pathfinder’] and endorse the even more radical approach embodied by FDAC, it would deliver huge benefits for parents, taxpayers and – most importantly of all – for children.’
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