Family Justice

: One of the points that Lord Howe made in the other place—it is all there in Hansard—is that his research shows that the outcome of about a quarter of contested cases does not involve face-to-face contact. A contact order may be made for a letter or Christmas card, or there may be no contact order at all, but a quarter of all cases seems to be a very large number. On the question of delay, does the Minister agree that one problem is that courts are making orders that are too insubstantial to start with, and that there should be a schedule of contact that escalates to substantive contact, so that there is no temptation constantly to return to court to ask for a little more?