Achieving positive change for children? Reducing the length of child protection proceedings: lessons from England and Wales

Court decisions are required to remove children, compulsorily, from their families, and approve permanent care arrangements which restrict or terminate parents’ rights. The children involved are mostly young, have experienced serious abuse or neglect and may require permanent placement away from their parent(s) for their remaining childhoods. In England and Wales, justice to parents has dominated the rhetoric about these proceedings; this has resulted in lengthy proceedings, long periods of uncertainty for children and reduced placement options. In order to reduce delays, reforms in England and Wales have set a time limit for the completion of care proceedings. The Children and Families Act 2014 limits proceedings to 26 weeks; approximately 60% of care proceedings are now completed within this period. This article will discuss the impact of these reforms on decision-making for children, questioning whether they achieve both good decisions for children and justice for families. It uses the findings of an ESRC-funded study: ‘Establishing outcomes of care proceedings for children before and after care proceedings reform (2015–2018)’

The mysterious case of disappearing family law and the shrinking vulnerable subject: The shifting sands of family law’s jurisdiction

This article seeks to critically examine the implications that the new eligibility requirements for legal aid as implemented by the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 are having on the ways in which private family law governs families. It makes use of a theoretical lens drawn from the work of Valverde (2009, 2014a, 2014b) on ‘jurisdiction’ to map the shift that has taken place within family law as a result of the political boundary that the act has drawn between ‘vulnerable’ litigants eligible for legal aid and the rest of families engaging with private family law, for whom self-sufficiency and responsibility is encouraged and expected. It argues that in reserving legal aid for a narrow group of vulnerable litigants, the formal scale of family law has shrunk, there being at the same time an increased reliance on more informal sources of law such as advice-based resources. This has led to a diversification of formal and informal scales of governance which operate according to different ‘logics’, which impact negatively on access to family justice for families from various backgrounds and circumstances. The article concludes with a call for family law researchers to be mindful of the need to look at both formal and more informal sources of family law in order to fully appreciate developments within the jurisdiction, particularly pernicious ones, and to be able to respond to them appropriately