Shared Parenting Information Group (SPIG) UK

Good Courts Guide - commentary

- what we said in 1999...

A legal lottery

What we found amounts to a legal lottery, with the outcome very much depending on where you live.

There are around 180 County Courts in England and Wales. Although in any year, between 70-90 courts do not make any orders refusing contact, they are not always the same courts. In fact only 13 courts have never refused an application for contact in each of the last seven years (Table 1).

Although the national average for refusals has been steadily falling from 6% in 1991 to less than 1.5% in 1999, some courts such as Doncaster have consistently refused four to five times this figure. And five courts which account for only 12% of the applications made each year, provide nearly 25% of the country's refusals. (Table 2)

Doncaster is of particular interest because it has:

• 2-3 times the national average of withdrawals
• 2-3 times the national average of orders of no order
• 4-5 times the national average of refusals
• half the national average of orders made

Just what is going on there? Are the residents of Doncaster so different from the rest of the country? So much worse than Liverpool and Manchester ?

It is difficult to see how the wide variations in refusals of contact orders are attributable to anything other than the range of judicial attitudes in different courts.

Welfare reports

Particular concerns and anomalies

• Barnstaple - which had an average of only two refusals a year, but leapt to 14 in 1995.
• Doncaster (as mentioned above) - which consistently had four / seven times the national average percentage of refusals, except in the first half of 1999 when refusals fell to 1.5 times the national average.
• Neighbouring Pontefract, which had an average of one / two refusals a year, but jumped to 10 in the first half of 1999. (who moved?)
• Portsmouth - which leapt from three refusals a year in 1993-4 to 55 in 1996, and back to four in 1998.
• Sheffield - which had a steady rise from seven refusals in 1992 to a peak of 64 in 1996, followed by an equally steady fall since.
• Southend on Sea - which leapt from two / three refusals a year in 1995-6 to 45 in 1997 but has since fallen back to normal.

Changes needed

• provides guidelines for the determination of Children Act applications
• monitors the outcomes at each court
• puts in place procedures to ensure uniform outcomes throughout the country

Method and terminology

For some reason the applications are divided into 'within divorce' and 'other'. Our understanding is that 'within divorce' relates to applications made during the period from the filing of a petition for divorce, up to the pronouncement of the decree nisi. The 'other' applications appear to relate to applications made before or after those times, or by other persons (such as grandparents) at any time. Although there are differences in the outcomes of these two types of applications, they did not appear to be consistent across the courts, so for simplicity we have combined the figures in order to give a picture of the outcomes across the whole life cycle of divorce.

We would have liked to relate outcomes to applications, but the information is collected on a monthly, quarterly or yearly basis and is the bare number of applications and outcomes in any particular year. Thus, as applications made in one particular year may not necessarily be adjudicated on in that year, there is no way of relating applications to outcomes. Although we tried to show outcomes as percentages of applications there were many anomalies, so we settled for showing each outcome as a percentage of the total outcomes in that year.

The main terms relating to outcomes are:

• Withdrawn. Applications can only be withdrawn with the agreement of the court - the most common reason being that an agreement has been reached. In our experience if contact has been frustrated to the extent that you have been forced to make application to the courts, you would be well advised to persist and obtain an order rather than rely on what may turn out to be only a transitory change of heart. In such circumstances the order is likely to be 'by consent' - making it much harder to overturn at a later date.
  Another reason for withdrawal is that lawyers may advise their clients that for some reason or other their application is unlikely to succeed. In these circumstances it may be considered better to withdraw rather than have a ruling refusing contact - in which case this outcome is tantamount to a refusal.
• Order refused. This refers to the cases where a court has refused to make an order or has made no order.
  This is a very serious order and not one to be entered lightly, but just why do some courts refuse so many orders? And why are there such wild variations? We noted that there are:
  • some courts which have never refused an application,
  • some which rarely refuse,
  • some which regularly refuse four to five times the national average, and
  • some which have inexplicable 'blips' of 20 times their normal number of refusals
• Order of no order. This is where the court has applied the non-intervention principle of the Children Act (see below). It does seem strange that when the applicant and their lawyers presumably know what the Children Act says, and maybe as a last resort have applied to court, that so many courts should take such a totally different view and refuse to make an order.

"Where a court is considering whether or not to make one or more orders under this Act with respect to a child, it shall not make the order or any of the orders unless it considers that doing so would be better for the child than not making an order at all" [Children Act 1989 - Section 1(5)]

• Orders made. These are orders made as a result of an application for contact. In some courts there are considerably more orders made than applications, and this may be because the court reviews the situation at a later stage and makes further orders.
  The figure also includes orders made of the court's own volition as a result of an application for a different order if: "the court considers that the order should be made even though no such application has been made" [Children Act 1989 - Section 10(1)(b)]

Tables

Court	Applications	Refusals
Aberystwyth	130	0
Accrington	390	0
Consett	227	0
Hereford	361	0
Hertford	199	0
Leigh	354	0
Penrith	89	0
Rawtenstall	151	0
Runcorn	344	0
Southport	379	0
Whitehaven	174	0
Wigan	861	0
Workington	149	0

Table 2 - The five courts which provide around 25% of the country's refusals each year

- table of refusals in each year

Court	1992	1993	1994	1995	1996	1997	1998
Birmingham	1	0	17	32	51	42	7
Doncaster	6	16	20	26	42	45	48
Leeds	3	7	12	2	38	38	35
PRDF	10	50	41	40	46	13	11
Sheffield	24	45	31	50	55	34	26
TOTALS (a)	44	118	121	150	232	172	127
England & Wales (b)	193	494	572	609	813	714	565
(a)/(b) as a percentage	23%	24%	21%	24%	29%	24%	22%

Table 3 - the 14 courts which have ordered one or more welfare reports per case in five of the last seven years

Court	% reports
Bishop Auckland	126
Chesterfield	153
Darlington	140
Dudley	134
Liverpool	160
Manchester	150
Rotherham	160
Sheffield	173
Stockport	160
Stoke-on-Trent	154
Truro	193
Walsall	143
Whitehaven	180
Wolverhampton	135

Table 4 - the 5 courts which have ordered welfare reports in less than 1 in 5 cases in five of the last seven years

Court	% reports
Chelmsford	15
Colchester	12
Coventry	6
Norwich	16
Southport	0

Last updated - 26 November 1999