President of Family Law Division reveals plans to tackle family court backlog

Reading time: two minutes

President of the Family Law Division Sir Andrew McFarlane has announced plans to reinvigorate the Public Law Outline (PLO) to address the “unacceptable” backlog of public law family cases.

The PLO, which was introduced a decade ago, is designed to streamline case management and ensure that proceedings are dealt with within 26 weeks. Despite some improvements in the number of care and supervision proceedings being resolved within 26 weeks, McFarlane acknowledges that progress has been slow and significant backlogs persist. He’s previously attributed the delays to the growing volume of cases and the impact of the covid-19 pandemic.

National and regional webinars supported by data will showcase the progress made so far while identifying lessons learned and targets for additional improvement.

Issue resolution hearings (IRH) will be one of the key areas of focus, according to McFarlane. During a recent visit to court centres, McFarlane discovered that fewer than 5% of cases were substantially or fully resolved at the IRH stage, resulting in 95% of cases requiring a final hearing. In addition, judges also reportedly have four or five IRH in a single day.

McFarlane explained that for a judge to undertake an IRH, they must be given “sufficient time to prepare the case as if preparing for the final hearing and the listing should be sufficient to accommodate the hearing of short evidence if required”. Failure to allocate adequate preparation and hearing time to the IRH “robs the court and the parties of any real opportunity to resolve issues and effectively accepts that the IRH will be no more than a pre-trial review hearing”.

He added: “Not to allocate time at the IRH stage is a totally false economy given the delay that will then follow, no doubt with further hearings, and the listing of a much longer final hearing in due course if the case remains contested.”

McFarlane plans to revive the PLO in October.