New Family Court Rules Put Children First, Senior Judge Says

Sir Andrew McFarlane has presided over a family justice system in which bitter custody battles clogged courts, tens of thousands of children waited in legal limbo, and an AI analysis of case judgments found judges using victim-blaming language in domestic abuse proceedings. This week, with government backing confirmed, the president of the family division announced the system was about to undergo its most significant overhaul in a generation.

McFarlane described the rollout of child-focused courts across England and Wales as "truly groundbreaking" and said it would be a "game changer" for family justice. He welcomed the government's support, saying the reform would turn the old approach "on its head." At its core, the model replaces the default assumption that disputes must be resolved through multiple court hearings with a fundamentally different question: what does this particular child need, and what is the fastest, safest way to deliver it?

In practice, cases involving serious allegations of abuse will now trigger an early assessment of whether a fact-finding hearing is actually required to establish what happened, rather than proceeding straight to contested proceedings. Where domestic abuse is not present and it is safe to do so, parents will be supported to reach an agreement outside court entirely. McFarlane said the model "benefits families and indeed the whole system with fewer hearings, a better understanding of domestic abuse and less parents returning to court because the arrangements have broken down."

The reforms arrive at a moment of acute pressure on the family courts. Delays have left tens of thousands of children in legal uncertainty after their parents separate. MPs have called for a formal inquiry into the use of parental alienation claims in custody disputes, with growing concern that mothers in domestic abuse cases are being blamed for failing to protect their children from perpetrators rather than being recognised as victims themselves.

Legal aid cuts have deepened the crisis. A former president of the Supreme Court said those cuts deny parents their basic human rights, while documented rises in the number of babies removed from mothers within days of birth have prompted warnings about the speed and circumstances of some removal decisions.

The systemic pressures inside social care compound the picture. Social workers, unable to offer preventive services due to funding constraints and fearful of institutional liability if a child is harmed, have in many cases defaulted to removing children from families rather than supporting them. Section 20 of the Children Act has been misused by some councils to place vulnerable children in care or with potential adopters without parents fully understanding the consequences or receiving legal advice. The number of children in kinship care has grown far beyond what the original legislation anticipated, yet without the robust support networks for carers that the scale now demands. The result, according to critics of the current system, is that across the country, primarily in poor communities, families are frightened and confidence in the courts is low.

Separately, new rules have eased reporting restrictions in family courts across England and Wales, opening proceedings to greater journalistic scrutiny for the first time in decades.

No evaluation data has been published quantifying exactly how many hearings the child-focused model reduces, or how many families it successfully diverts from court. The government has yet to publish a full rollout timetable or name the courts where the model will first operate. For those who have been pressing for reform, the test of this overhaul lies not in the welcome it has received from the judiciary, but in what the data shows once it is running at scale.