Research Report: The pre-proceedings process for families at the edge of care proceedings

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Authors Judith Masson and Jonathan Dickens with Kay Bader and Julie Young
Published by School of Law, University of Bristol and the Centre for Research on Children and Families, University of East Anglia, 2013

SUMMARY
This study focuses on the “pre-proceedings process”, introduced in April 2008. When a child’s case warrants court proceedings, parents are sent a “letter before proceedings”, qualifying them for free legal advice so they can be accompanied by a lawyer at a “pre-proceedings meeting”. The meeting discusses plans to safeguard a child and the action the local authority will take if this is not effective. It aims to avoid care proceedings, or where that is not possible, improve the quality of court applications, enabling cases to proceed more quickly.

The research aimed to find out what kind of cases end up in court and which are successfully diverted by the pre-proceedings process; how the meetings are arranged and managed; how parents and solicitors felt about the meetings; and to what extent the meetings are successful in finding alternatives to care proceedings or in speeding up the court process.

Researchers attended and observed 36 meetings, interviewed 70 professionals and 24 parents, and examined 207 case files in six local authorities.

They found that the pre-proceedings process was used in 57 per cent of cases where a local authority had decided there was enou