Category Archives: family-justice-review

Are you sure about this shared parenting malarky?

So Alan Beith, Chair of the Justice Select Committee and government advisor, has written to David Cameron asking him to reconsider government policy on shared parenting. The letter, sent last week to the PM, the Secretary of State for Justice, the Minister of State for Children and Families, and to the Parliamentary-Under Secretaries of State for Justice and Education, in essence asks the government to think again about its plans to implement a shared parenting provision, raising concerns with all of the four proposed legislative provisions set out in the current consultation.

I think that it is pretty significant that the Justice Select Committee has taken this action at a point where the Government has announced it plans to implement this policy in some shape or form and is now consulting on how best to go about it. It is a direct challenge to government policy and comes in the same week as the All Party Parliamentary Group on Child Protection launched its own enquiry into the proposed family justice reforms, including safety issues around shared parenting (see here also).

I have not forgotten that I have promised to set out my own views on shared parenting, and on a separate but related point, to respond to Stephen Twist’s own innovative proposals for restructuring private law disputes. It’s a question of prioritising other more pressing issues. It’s on the to do list…

As One Door Closes…

As the consultation on same sex marriage closes another opens : shared parenting. We just can’t agree about anything to do with the shape of families, can we?

Thankfully, @suesspiciousmin has been swift in summarising the consultation on shared parenting in his post (Co-op (Good with Kids) on the Suesspicious Minds blog – say it in a Scottish accent for it to make sense) and he is, I think it is fair to say, not mad keen on any of the four proposed draft provisions. Nor am I*. I have yet to make up my mind about shared parenting (I have promised a detailed post but have failed so far to produce it), although my fairly strong instinct is that the idea of introducing a shared parenting presumption will add little and may make matters worse. But I agree with @suesspiciousmin – these draft provisions are a bit rubbish:

If I were a lobbyist for any father’s rights group, I’d be mighty disappointed with what’s on offer. It looks to me like nothing more than a placatory gesture.  I’m not, by the way, advocating one way or the other on whether there should be a presumption or starting point of broadly equal time, but I can’t see how you can have a consultation about shared parenting without at least one of the options being that.

We already know that F4J don’t like the proposals (quel surprise). And to me they either add nothing or add confusion. It’s a shame that @suesspiciousmin’s own draft is not on the table:

“When the Court decides where a child should live, or how much contact a child should have with a parent, the Court should strive to make an order that allows the child to have a meaningful relationship with each parent wherever possible and where the order made results in one parent spending a significantly greater proportion of time with the child than the other, the Court must have good reasons for doing so, and set them out in a judgment, and gender should never be a reason for that”

or, even shorter –  “There is a rebuttable presumption that a child should spend significant periods of time with each parent, and the Court must consider in each case whether a broadly equivalent amount of time would be the correct outcome.“

As he says – if there is to be a provision it might as well say what it means. Since I can’t vote for @suesspiciousmin’s option 5 I think it’ll have to be None of the above.

*Confession : I am relying on @suesspiciousmin’s summary at present, having yet to read the consultation doc myself.