Cafcass contacts Association of Lawyers for Children
The Chief Executive Officer of Cafcass has advised in the contact that they are ‘close to triggering the use of prioritisation protocol in the region that includes South Yorkshire and Humberside’.
Cafcass is the the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service, is a non-departmental public body of the Ministry of Justice.
Cafcass state they: “have about 20% more open work, with longer durations and more requests for additional work to support our reports to the courts”.
The aim is to prioritise the most urgent incoming work should Cafcass find themselves with too many open active cases to allocate to Cafcass social workers. They report that ‘since the start of the Covid-19 crisis, demand for family justice has not reduced and in fact in recent months… have seen increases in both Public and Private law applications in the context of a drop in national throughput through the family courts of about 20%’.
Sadly, this underlines again the pressure on the whole family justice and local authority children’s services systems. The compact expresses the ‘significant impact on all aspects of work to support vulnerable children and their families’.
Now, more than ever, this stresses the need for cases which are not in absolute need of the family court system, should be resolved using other alternative dispute resolution methods.
You can read the full letter at the CAFCASS website, through this external link.