Family president hands in his notice as he highlights value of solicitors

The president of the Family Division yesterday told MPs of the importance of solicitors, the family drug and alcohol courts - and announced he had handed in his six months’ notice to step down from his post. Appearing before the Commons justice committee during a session on reform of the family court, Sir Andrew McFarlane said that cuts to legal aid had contributed to the backlog. 

'The volume [of cases] went up after legal aid was largely removed because litigants in person were not meeting solicitors who were saying “come on, you do not want to go to court about that”,' he said. 'The perception in the public may be that the lawyers were generating the work but I think the statistics show it was the other way around.’

Stressing the value of 'problem solving' family drug and alcohol courts (FDACs), he said ‘all the research shows for every £1 spent reaps £2 or £3 benefit’. However thanks to 'haphazard' funding, he described access to FDAC courts as a ‘postcode lottery’.

The judge added: ‘I have got to tread carefully, chair, because I am a judge, but it does occur to me that the social benefit of using the court as a moment in someone’s life for intervention, with the judge as a parental figure, does achieve massive change for those individuals, their lives turn around.' This should be of interest across the government, he said. '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 of Education. But I am a judge, I could not have possibly said what I have just said.

‘The reason I am passionate about this is, although it says on the tin drugs and alcohol, I understand that if not every case then nearly every case, an underlying feature is domestic abuse. These individuals are serially victims of horrid sustained domestic abuse and turning to drugs and alcohol is a coping mechanism.

'The professionals working in FDAC say we often have to address the domestic abuse first before we can allow the individual to have confidence to move on. Well, if that is right, that it is a domestic abuse facility to address domestic abuse, then all the more reason for it to be taken seriously in the campaign that the government rightly has on focusing on violence against women and girls, so I hope I have not overstepped the mark. I may have to retire.’

McFarlane, 71, was asked by Labour MP Sarah Russell ‘how matters are going in terms of finding a replacement?’. He replied: ‘There will need to be a Judicial Appointments Commission competition to find my successor and that will start and I have given six months’ notice on the understanding the successor will be identified before that period.'

In his Substack column, legal commentator Joshua Rozenberg today named Lord Justice Cobb, 63, as favourite to succeed McFarlane as president.