Leading family lawyer Christina Blacklaws has hit out at the ‘dangerous’ workload of employed guardians at the Children and Family Court Advisory Service (Cafcass).

Her broadside came as the government prepared to announce a further £1.6m in funding for Cafcass’s London region this week, on condition that it uses this to reduce its backlog of cases.

Cafcass said last month that it had reduced the number of unallocated s31 cases in London, which involve applications to put children into care, from 411 in August to 151 in September. It had been able to do this because of the ‘unprecendented’ number of staff due for retirement who had chosen to stay on, it said.

However, Blacklaws, Law Society council member for child care, claimed the backlog had been reduced by piling more cases on employed guardians in London who ‘simply do not have the capacity’ to take them on.

She said: ‘These employed guardians already have 12 cases. They have now been given six to eight more cases, an increase of at least 50%. I’ve had guardians contacting me asking me not to phone them before November because they are so busy.’

She added that she was concerned guardians would be forced to ‘skim’ the case and do only the bare essentials, which could be ‘dangerous’. It also meant that children’s lawyers were forced to take on extra work, reducing ‘any tiny profit margin’ to nothing.

Backing Blacklaws, Caroline Little, co-chair of the Association of Lawyers for Children, added that some guardians were so overloaded they could not remember the names of the children they were supposed to be representing.

A Cafcass spokesman insisted that a ‘massive increase in demand’ had forced it to change its procedures to deliver a ‘safe minimum service’.

He added that all cases were ‘guaranteed an initial safeguarding analysis that involves checking for risk and making inquiries with other agencies. This… allows us to prioritise cases.’ Of 12 staff who had been eligible for retirement, nine had requested to stay on, with six requests accepted under contracted hours or as bank staff.

Blacklaws added that she thought Cafcass had misrepresented the increase in care cases. The spokesman said it was ‘nonsense to deny that there is a massive increase in demand’, adding that the figures were official statistics.