Family Justice

: I might write to the right hon. Gentleman and copy my response on whether that position has changed to other Members who are in the Chamber. Another matter referred to by the Committee is the problem of judicial continuity, and therefore of delay and enforcement. The process will take longer if the judge has to read all the papers from scratch, and enforcement will be more effective if the judge has a deeper understanding of the case because he has been involved with it from the outset. There has been a view that a grip needs to be taken by good case management at the earliest possible stage, and that there should be judicial continuity. The president's private law programme also issued guidance on that in January 2005. The question is whether the rate of judges per case is unacceptably high, and whether the measures that have been taken for good case management are working to bring down the number of judges in any one case. I have agreed with the president of the family division, in direct response to the point made by the Constitutional Affairs Committee about judicial continuity, that we should do a quick dip sample to tell us the rate of judges per case in five court centres. We shall provide the Committee with that information and measure it again in due course to give us a sense of the numbers. Otherwise, as the Committee heard, there is concern about judicial continuity, but no sense of whether it is very bad only in some cases, or is a problem in all, or of whether it is getting better or worse. That has been a helpful prompt to some progress on that matter. As to the matter of a sufficient number of judges, we have just completed a review of the work of the High Court and are consulting on proposals to make better use of High Court judges. It is clear that a good proportion of the cases that go to the High Court could be heard by circuit and district judges. We must deal with capacity and allocation, and the question of whether work that circuit judges are doing could go to magistrates if there is sufficient capacity. The right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed and the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke) raised the issue of domestic violence. Obviously, every case must be judged on its merits; in questions of contact, the interest of the child is paramount and the facts of the case must dictate the outcome. However, we now understand that it is very unlikely, in cases that involve domestic violence by the father against the mother, that the child is not affected. It is most likely that the child witnesses the violence. All too often, the child is physically caught in the crossfire. Even if the child does not witness the violence, they are in a room nearby and hear it. It used to be said that if a woman was being beaten by her husband, she should stay with him for the sake of the children. We have thought better of that and decided that, more often than not, children will be damaged by being brought up in a household where there is domestic violence, not least because fear is ever present in such households. Being brought up by a mother who lives in fear for her physical safety must have an effect. A good friend of mine, talking about the domestic violence suffered by her mother at the hands of her father, said that when her father came home from work, she and her mother would listen to the sound of his key in the lock, because that would tell them whether the mother was going to get a beating. Even on the days when she did not, and the key went smoothly into the lock, with no sense of anger or whatever was conveyed by its sound, there was still fear. Much of the work that has been done has been to recognise not only the higher than previously acknowledged prevalence of domestic violence, but its effect on children. I speak of a father being violent to a mother because for the most part that is what happens. It is not a 50:50 split between mothers being violent to fathers and fathers to mothers, as one can tell from the homicide statistics. Obviously, everything else is subject to reporting vagaries, but one thing that is not subject to those vagaries is the homicide statistics, as one can count the bodies and look at the gender. Domestic violence and the overwhelming majority of domestic homicides and injuries that are serious enough to put the victim in hospital are still mostly perpetrated by men against women. We were asked about the monitoring and evaluation of the gateway forms. At present, we need sufficient cases to get a sense of how things are working, what are the outcomes and what orders are made. On mediation, we all say that we wish that we could force people to agree with each other and we all know as we say it that it is a contradiction in terms. The hierarchy of desirability is, first, that parents agree, which is in their best interests and, of course, those of the child, and that they never go near the family justice system; secondly, that the parents seek mediation if they cannot agree; thirdly, that there is a court process; fourthly—the least desirable—that there is a court process followed by enforcement proceedings. We are all on the same page in that respect and there is a healthy ferment of discussion about the best way to proceed.