Monthly Archives: October 2017

The Court and Tribunal Service (HMCTS) is now entering into ‘phase 2′ of its digital transformation process.While many lawyers remain cynical about any government-funded IT project within the justice system, and while there are legitimate concerns still to be addressed about access to justice, there is no doubt that Susan Acland-Hood is driving a strong reform agenda designed to bring the court system into the 21st century.’Phase 2’ is expected to last 18 months, meaning that by early 2019 we can expect to see uncontested divorces conducted entirely online and, more ambitiously, it is being suggested that uncontested financial settlements could be resolved online as well.A considerable amount of effort also seems to be aimed at ‘public law’ children cases (considering whether to take children into care) with developments that could eventually be rolled out elsewhere, including a digital document management system that might one day see all courts go entirely paper-free.We’ll be keeping an eye on this one with interest…

You may have seen many commentators, the BBC included, reporting this week that divorces were up in 2016 by 5.8% – “the biggest year-on-year rise since 1985”!There is no real news here at all.  Divorces in 2015 were at their lowest since 1971 and were an unexpected 9% drop on 2014 – the 2016 figure was just a reversion to the mean. The reality is that divorce numbers have been dropping pretty steadily from a high of 165,000 in 1993 to 107,000 in 2016.Also, the claim that “the number of divorces last year in England and Wales was the highest since 2009” is simply wrong. The data shows the number of divorces was as follows:2016 – 106,9592015 – 101,0552014 – 111,1692013 – 114.7202012 – 118,1402011 – 117, 5582010 – 119,5892009 – 113,949So 2016 had the highest number of divorces since, er, 2014. Oh.It seems that divorce, as with so many things in life, is plagued not only by lies and damned lies but by statistics too.

Mr Justice Bodey has used his valedictory speech to highlight the extent to which legal aid cuts made in 2013 have impacted many people’s ability to achieve justice for themselves or the children in the family justice system.Since the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 came into effect, legal aid has no longer been available to litigants in matrimonial finance or private children law cases other than in a small number of cases featuring domestic violence.  As a result, many of those most in need of proper support are left to navigate their way through the family justice system without any advice or understanding of what is expected of them.As Bodey J highlights, this has a knock-on effect both on judges and on the chronically underfunded court system, with poorly informed litigants in person clogging up the already rusting wheels of justice.At Collyer Bristow we now circumvent this mess as far as possible by directing our clients into arbitration and private FDRs – essentially BUPA to the court’s NHS.  That’s great for our clients, but it shouldn’t have to be that way, and in some ways it will exacerbate the problem by creating a true two-tier system, with private justice for the well off and a barely functioning system for everyone else.Family lawyers are almost universally rallying around Bodey’s comments. In my view it’s unlikely, however, that the message will get through to those holding the purse strings.