Family justice reform will fail unless procedural integrity is built into the system

Justice Minister Alison Levitt’s recent remarks about the family courts in England and Wales should be read as more than a political intervention. Her criticism that the system has not been good enough for women and children, alongside the government’s wider reform programme, signals that family justice is now firmly a question of system design as much as legal doctrine.

The national rollout of Child Focused Courts is an important development. According to the Ministry of Justice, the model, previously piloted in Dorset and North Wales, has reduced case duration by around seven and a half months and is intended to support earlier risk identification, stronger specialist input, and less adversarial handling of private law disputes. The government has committed funding over three years, including additional social worker capacity and domestic abuse specialists.

These reforms are welcome. But they will remain incomplete unless they are matched by procedural infrastructure capable of addressing the structural weaknesses that continue to undermine fairness.

The central difficulty is fragmentation.

Family proceedings frequently involve issues that cut across multiple domains: safeguarding, trauma, participation capacity, financial disclosure, housing instability, property ownership, and institutional records held by separate public and private bodies. Yet the court process still operates too often as though these are adjacent rather than interconnected realities. The result is a decision-making environment in which relevant evidence may exist, but not be coherently visible.

This has at least four practical consequences.

First, evidential discontinuity. Information that should be read together is often separated by institutional boundaries, creating avoidable gaps between what is known and what is judicially seen.

Second, participation distortion. Litigants affected by trauma may present in ways that are still too easily misinterpreted. Distress, inconsistency under pressure, or difficulty with procedural navigation can be read as weakness in credibility rather than evidence of impaired participation.

Third, safeguarding dilution. Where agencies are not working from joined-up information, patterns of risk may be identified late or only partially, particularly in cases involving domestic abuse.

Fourth, tactical imbalance. In a fragmented process, the party better able to manage narrative, procedure, and sustained litigation pressure may gain an advantage unrelated to the substantive merits of safety or truth.

This is why current reform must be understood as only a first stage.

A more child-focused model is plainly preferable to one that reproduces adversarial harm. The judiciary’s support for the new approach, and stakeholder support from Cafcass and others, reflects that point. But the long-term success of reform will depend on whether the system also develops stronger mechanisms for continuity, visibility and procedural accountability.

In practice, this means asking more precise operational questions.

How should vulnerability be identified and carried through proceedings?
How should trauma-related participation needs be recorded and revisited?
How should cross-agency safeguarding concerns be surfaced without relying on a litigant in person to perform the role of coordinator?
How should courts assess disclosure integrity where relevant records may sit outside the immediate case file?
How should the family justice system prevent fragmented process from becoming a form of substantive unfairness?

These are not peripheral matters. They go to the heart of procedural fairness.

If family justice reform is framed only as a matter of ethos, it risks underestimating the structural features that generate unfairness in the first place. A less adversarial hearing is valuable. But it does not by itself solve evidential fragmentation. Specialist support is necessary. But it does not automatically create continuity between institutions. Early intervention is important. But it must be matched by systems capable of preserving and connecting relevant information over time.

That is why the next step in reform should focus on procedural integrity as infrastructure, not aspiration.

The question is no longer whether the previous model was causing harm. Current ministerial statements and the national rollout of Child Focused Courts have effectively settled that point. The question now is whether the profession is prepared to support a more integrated form of family justice: one in which safeguarding, participation, disclosure and institutional visibility are treated as core procedural issues rather than collateral concerns.

Without that shift, reform may improve tone while leaving structural unfairness intact.

With it, family justice has a chance not only to sound different, but to work differently.

Samantha Avril-Andreassen is the founder of SAFECHAIN™ and author of The Architecture of an Unbreakable Soul. Her work focuses on safeguarding integrity, procedural fairness, evidential continuity, and cross-agency reform in domestic abuse and family justice systems.