CYP Now - EDITORIAL: Family courts threatened by credibility crisis

Events over the past few months have led to an increasingly widespread view that the family courts are in crisis. It is still not clear how many cases will have to be re-examined where children were taken into care on the basis of the theories of the discredited paediatrician Sir Roy Meadow. Estimates vary from a few dozen to several thousand.

Add to that the chaos within the children's guardian service Cafcass, where long delays in children being assigned guardians are resulting in cases being drawn out months longer than they otherwise would need to be.

The number of lawyers prepared to take on publicly funded cases is dwindling, mainly because the rates they are paid under the legal aid system have increased only once in 10 years.

And then there is an increasingly militant band of fathers who contend that in being denied access to their children, they and their children have been denied justice. You can dismiss one or two men who manage to disrupt traffic by scaling a crane as aggrieved nutters, but now they are popping up all over the country.

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