Cafcass blighted by understaffing and poor training, say family lawyers

Family lawyers in the South East have expressed little surprise at Ofsted's criticism of Cafcass services in the region but say the findings reflect unfairly on the effort deployed by overstretched teams trying to do their best in a context of chronic understaffing.

'Cafcass services in the region have been short staffed for a long time,' said Nicola Jones-King, a solicitor at Croydon-based McMillan Williams. 'People don't seem to stay very long and it affects the quality of assessments despite all the energy they are putting into offering the best service they can.'

The Ofsted report published last week found that Cafcass offers a 'good to adequate' service for children involved in public law proceedings but that its services in private law proceedings in the region were inadequate.

Ofsted found the priority given to public law cases has led to serious delays in providing services to children and families involved in private law proceedings and made 10 recommendations for service improvement.

Cafcass has played down the negative publicity surrounding the publication of the report and insists that improvements are already underway.

'We have been working on improving the quality of practice and bringing more resources to the front line even before the report was published,' a spokesperson told Solicitors Journal.

One example he gave of recent practice improvement was the partnership agreement with the children's charity Coram signed in April, allowing Cafcass to offer more practical help, including psychiatry and psychology services.

But such moves may not necessarily be the best solution to Cafcass's problems. The purpose of Cafcass is to assist children involved in court proceedings and one could argue that the assistance provided with peripheral difficulties is technically within its remit but perhaps not within its budget, without other services suffering,' said James-King. 'There is also a risk that they would be spreading even more thinly their already stretched resources.'

And resources, or lack of resources, are the main reason why lawyers believe Cafcass has been unable to deliver the service expected and has been so severely condemned in Ofsted's report.

'It takes a huge amount of time to get a report in contact cases,' said Daniel Bennett, a solicitor at Gardner Croft in Canterbury. 'It can take two months to secure a hearing date if a dispute cannot be resolved amicably. The judge will then order Cafcass to produce a report, which in some cases has taken 20 weeks to prepare.'

The time taken for Cafcass to produce reports is also a major source of frustration for Stuart Ruff, a solicitor at Thomas Eggar in Gatwick. Ruff has experienced waits of one month to be informed of the officer responsible for preparing a report, and 16 weeks from the court order for the report to be made.

'The contents of the report are persuasive on the court and frequently the parties will wait for the report before deciding how to proceed with the case,' said Ruff. 'Until then, they are in complete limbo.'

In some cases, additional Cafcass officers have been drafted in from other parts of the country but the improvements have been marginal, continued Bennett, as the officers do not have the local knowledge. As a result cases end up simply sitting on a list and hearings are systematically adjourned pending the production of a report, generating further unnecessary work for lawyers.

The greatest frustration however is with the quality of the reports. Cafcass officers are expected to produce clear recommendations in each case but there are indications that many reports are just not robust enough.

'The judge instructs Cafcass to be the ears and eyes of the court and make specific recommendations in each case and suggest which option is in the child's best interests. Too often the report merely provides a list of possible options, which is too woolly,' said Bennett.

In one case, Bennett said, the Cafcass officer even changed her mind when the other party objected to her recommendation in the course of a client meeting, leading to a complete change of course.

According to Eileen Sutton, also a solicitor at Gardner Croft, the underlying problem is one of training. 'There are some very good Cafcass officers out there and the difficulty is simply that there are too few people to do the work so deadlines slip or work is done too quickly. In other cases, the question is different: Cafcass officers cannot sit on the fence and make vague recommendations, they must feel confident that they can make definitive recommendations to the court, otherwise it will just further delay the proceedings, and that is a question of training.'

Ruff likewise said the quality of the reports varied and that this raised issues not just of capacity but fundamental training issues.

Ofsted will monitor the implementation of a 'recovery plan' for the South East, with target dates ranging from June to October 2008 for the main nine recommendations.