The Ministry of Justice have released the latest family court statistics from July to September 2020.
Jan Galloway, Partner at Moore Barlow commented on the statistics. She said:
“It’s a sad reality of Covid that domestic violence cases have increased by 26% in this period. This is a note of caution to us all in the profession to do what we can to remedy that and ensure appropriate support is provided to the vulnerable and families as a whole to avoid this happening, rather than forcing victims to rely on the court’s input after the event.
“The increase in private law matters is a troubling trend as these take up valuable court time and many judges are losing tolerance with a number of such applications. Some of these concern issues which parents should be able to reach a decision on by sensibly exercising their parental responsibility, and are ripe for some form of dispute resolution such as mediation to resolve. However some parents have sought to use this pandemic to their advantage in child-based matters so parties do still need access to the court in these circumstances, and the rise will be due to such parental behaviour.”
Read the statistics in full here.
