He expects his successor to be determined via a judicial appointments commission competition
UK Court of Appeal judge Andrew McFarlane has announced his resignation as UK president of the family division, reported the Law Society Gazette.
He revealed that he had given his six months’ notice at a Commons justice committee session discussing family court reform. In response to Labour member of parliament Sarah Russell’s query about his replacement, McFarlane said his successor would be identified through a judicial appointments commission competition.
McFarlane said he expected his successor to be named before the six months were up. McFarlane has been in the role since July 2018, when he succeeded James Munby.
McFarlane, a family law specialist, was a lord justice of appeal and joined the High Court bench in 2005. He was a judge in the High Court’s Family Division, which comprises 19 High Court judges.
He has tackled cases involving surrogacy, adoption, and child custody. At present, he is a Court of Appeal judge.
As president of the family division, McFarlane concentrated on enhancing England and Wales’ family court system, effecting reforms to improve efficiency and user friendliness. He championed the increased use of technology to limit delays and streamline the court process.
During the Commons justice committee session, he highlighted how legal aid cuts had exacerbated the existing family court backlog, noting that case volume soared because “litigants in person were not meeting solicitors who were saying ‘come on, you do not want to go to court about that’,” according to a statement published by the Gazette.
“The perception in the public may be that the lawyers were generating the work but I think the statistics show it was the other way around,” he said in a statement published by the Gazette.
He added that as a result of what he called “haphazard” funding, access to family drug and alcohol courts had become a “postcode lottery.”
“I have got to tread carefully, chair, because I am a judge, but it does occur to me that the social benefit of using the court as a moment in someone’s life for intervention, with the judge as a parental figure, does achieve massive change for those individuals, their lives turn around,” McFarlane said in a statement published by the Gazette. “The MoJ do their bit by providing the courtroom and the judge to be the facility, but it is the Home Office that must have interest in this, the Department of Health, the Department of Education.”
He pointed out that domestic abuse was a significant underlying factor in drugs and alcohol cases.
“The professionals working in FDAC say we often have to address the domestic abuse first before we can allow the individual to have confidence to move on. Well, if that is right, that it is a domestic abuse facility to address domestic abuse, then all the more reason for it to be taken seriously in the campaign that the government rightly has on focusing on violence against women and girls, so I hope I have not overstepped the mark,” McFarlane said in a statement published by the Gazette.
