I have a comment to make about the English process. In English family court cases, there is a fact-finding process right at the start, which is an early test for things such as domestic abuse. That is not present in the Scottish court system. Shared Parenting Scotland and Scottish Women’s Aid were interested in such a change being made, but that relates more to court procedures.
I, too, have had the chance to see quite a large number of child welfare reports. I have seen some very good ones and some very bad ones. We do not want to throw the baby out with the bath water. We have some good child welfare reporters operating in Scotland, but we have no effective oversight of them. Nobody looks at a sample of a child welfare reporter’s reports—that should happen particularly when they are starting out but also when they are established—with a view to working out whether what they are doing is good. There is very little control over how much they report.
11:15
The changes that we made as a result of the working group on bar reporters have been good, because they mean that the court specifies in far more detail what it wants from the reporter. However, I feel that there is a need to look wider. We should preserve what works well in Scotland and try to build from that towards a better process in which we introduce the skills of child psychologists, parenting therapists and social workers alongside the evidence-finding abilities of lawyers. We have changed in Scotland. Almost all the work used to be done by social workers; now, it is almost all done by lawyers. I do not think that either is good.
We want training and proper oversight. I do not care whether that is done by the Scottish Government or the judiciary, as long as it is done properly.
What is missing from the bill is the potential to recognise that there are other key posts. You have heard mention in various submissions of child rights officers—of which we have a few in Scotland—and of parenting co-ordinators. Both those categories of professionals could play a very useful role, and they could take some of the load off the court. At the moment, when cases go back again and again for child welfare hearings in the Scottish courts, a vast amount of court time is taken up with micromanaging disputes between parents. A parenting co-ordinator or a child rights officer could work with the parents when the problems happen, not six to eight weeks after the problems, when the case finally comes to court. They could try to solve some of those problems, which would save us a lot of court time.
The statistics that we have on the Scottish courts are very poor at the moment, but I reckon that we have about 3,000 cases a year in the family courts, about 10,000 child welfare hearings, 500 case-management hearings and about 1,000 child welfare reports. I do not think all that should be happening in the court: some of it should be happening with professionals outside court. There is a significant cost saving to be achieved, which is not recognised in the papers accompanying the bill.
I hope that the bill leads to effective training and supervision of child welfare reporters but also opens up the potential for Scotland to experiment with far more use both of child rights officers and of parenting co-ordinators, which are the missing link here. You may need to put the powers for that in the primary legislation even if you are going to work out the detail at a secondary or an administrative stage. You need the powers to be in the legislation so that you can have those people working under the remit of the court. The key decisions are made by sheriffs and judges, but the implementation can be passed down the line.
I am not sure whether I have answered all your questions.