Blair has killed family life, says Maureen Freely

Maureen's article appears in today's Sunday Times magazine.

EXTRACTS FROM ARTICLE:

Prime suspect
Lifelong Labour supporter Maureen Freely has been at the thick of family policy for a decade as an author, academic and political commentator — and as a mother of four. But she can take no more. The government, she argues, has killed family life. And all the evidence points to Tony Blair being the main culprit

ON DIVORCE MAUREEN SAYS:

Though officially committed to shared parenting after separation and divorce, and fully aware that our family court system is a disaster – exacerbating conflicts between parents, creating conflicts where none existed, and often permanently excluding one parent, generally the father, for reasons anybody who was not a judge or a family court welfare officer would call capricious – the government has changed nothing. It has commissioned a few reports and pilot projects and left it at that. Meanwhile, families continue to travel through this discredited system at the rate of 80,000 a year.

If we calculate that the average family includes two children, we can see that family courts affect the lives of a quarter of a million men, women and children annually, and often adversely.

WITNESS: Stephen Wiser

Stephen Wiser, 55, a company director from Hertfordshire, was divorced five years ago. He has four children from his marriage, whom he hasn’t seen for six years. He is a co-founder of the parent-support group Jump

“I have pictures of my children and I kiss them every morning and every night. I have been self-employed for 35 years. I feel unsupported and let down by this government because of their inability, or unwillingness, to adequately reform the family law system. Before this election this government introduced a pilot project —“the early interventions project” — to intervene with mediation and speed up the divorce process, because what happens is you can get a court date, which may take three months, then it can be adjourned for three months. So six months have gone by and children are becoming alienated from the nonresident parent.. But the project was just another ploy to buy a year of inaction and get them past the last election without too much controversy. As predicted by everyone, it was an unmitigated disaster, and wasted millions of pounds.

“I realised the government would never be forced to change or couldn’t afford to be seen to be caving in to pressure from the likes of Fathers4Justice, which is why I started a political initiative to move matters along. The result has been effectively no meaningful response from the government. Regarding family law, I’ve supplied written submissions to the constitutional affairs committee, the Department for Education and Skills, and Cafcass (Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service). Cafcass is the organisation that acts as expert witness — to interview the children and families and report back to the courts. Listening in on the debates in parliament, you realise that Cafcass is totally underfunded, overworked, understaffed and demoralised, and still the government doesn’t come up with any money to help them do the job properly.

“This government should be more interested in improving people’s lives, not simply maintaining the status quo and attracting headlines for what they aspire, but fail, to do. The situation is so frustrating that some solicitors have banded together. They’re now called collaborative law solicitors, which means that the two sets of solicitors work to reach an agreement before it gets to court. If they fail to reach an agreement, neither of them can act for that client. So they have a vested interest in cutting away all cost, all the delay. It’s all in the child’s best interest.

“When I started this, I didn’t expect there to be any benefit or change in my personal circumstances. I’ve done this for the hundreds of thousands of other parents, and children and grandparents who don’t get a look-in in this situation. It’s a national disgrace.”

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