Top judge: Too much spent on child cases
TOO much public money is being spent on court cases involving children in care, a senior judge says.
Sir James Munby, who is head of the family court system, said cash was being ‘squandered’ on unnecessary lawyers.
He said the number of taxpayerfunded professionals should be cut as long as youngsters were properly represented in court.
Every child should have a social worker and a solicitor and, in serious cases, a barrister or even a QC. But he said in a notice to judges and lawyers that ‘ we need to remember that all this costs money’.
The President of the Family Division said: ‘It is no good complaining that public funds are available only for X and not for Y if money available for X is being squandered. Money should only be spent on what is necessary to enable the court to deal with the proceedings justly.
‘If a task is not necessary – if it is unnecessary – why should litigants or their professional advisers expect public money to be made available?’
He said 12,781 new cases entered the Family Courts in the year to March, a 15 per cent rise on the year before.
Sir James said he backed an inquiry by Justice Secretary Liz Truss into ‘a reformed level of representation for children’ in adoption, care and similar cases.
He said the focus would be on the scope ‘for dispensing with the attendance of some, or even, in some circumstances, all, of the child’s professional team’.
The call from Sir James follows the scandal over the legal aid bill run up by lawyers working for Ben Butler, the father who killed his six-year-old daughter Ellie.
The Daily Mail revealed earlier this month that her mother Jennie Gray – jailed for 42 months for covering up the murder – was given £223,266 to pay for lawyers who argued for Ellie to be returned to her parents during a fourmonth family court case in 2012.
Figures obtained under Freedom of Information laws show the pair ran up £1,185,285 in civil legal aid bills. Butler and Gray were both represented by solicitors and two barristers, including a QC each.