WE STAND!                 

Uniting Mothers and Fathers against systems which are failing both sides.

Defund Cafcass and Redirect the Funds to Local Authorities

Dear parents, families, MPs, family court personnel, disaffected Cafcass workers, Solicitors, Barristers and all other conscientious objectors of Cafcass,

This is a petition to defund Cafcass and redirect the funds to Local Authorities before the entire system collapses, and more children die.

I am deeply concerned about the appalling state of Cafcass’s services and their complete inability to protect children, be impartial, do the job that they were hired to do and their inability to control their own funding.  

If Cafcass are allowed yet more funding to neglect more vulnerable children going through family court, I fear this will lead to more infant deaths like that of baby P, and more abuse of parents and children like the abuse committed by the Cafcass worker, Susie Smith. Mark my words, if Cafcass are allowed to continue operating in this fashion and are allowed to capitalise on COVID-19, blaming their failings on the rising number of cases, and hiring agency staff to perform roles and complete reports which even the senior Cafcass practitioners cannot do, vulnerable babies and children will be abused, and some will die. 

Cafcass are a cataclysmic failure. Unfortunately the failings and prejudices I have witnessed and of hundreds of cases I have knowledge of, are commonplace for Cafcass. Indeed Cafcass’s policies, courses and framework make it impossible for any Cafcass worker to be unbiased and make it impossible to place the welfare of the children at the heart of each case.   

In 2019-20, Cafcass was granted funding of £121.902m from Central Government plus they drew down from sponsors, additional funding of £1.866m for contact services. Of this almost £124M, overwhelmingly, most parents felt that Cafcass did a bad job.

Despite this, the government’s response was to grant Cafcass more money to destroy more cases. In May 2021 it was reported that Cafcass were granted an extra £8m for 2021-22 to tackle record caseloads. This was a failure, obviously. In October 2021, it is reported that Cafcass have asked government for another £2.7M to fund agency social worker recruitment as they allege their staff have reached ‘breaking point’. Cafcass are clearly cash grabbing and exploiting cases to gain more funding. I believe that this is a deception of appearance by Cafcass whereby they misdirect cases which do not meet any or very low thresholds of social work, to themselves to perform section 7 reports, of which they misdirect the cases to their own useless and bias courses so they can gain more government funding.

These courses, such as The Separated Parents Information Programme (SPIP), have no validity or reliability whatsoever and the theoretical model used (Kubler-Ross 1969) was originally designed to explain the common stages of grief in terminally ill patients and not to explain how parents behave or feel when they separate. Even to explain the stages of dyeing, there is no evidence to suggest that an individual will go through all of these stages and if they did there is no evidence to suggest that one stage leads to another or indeed comes before the next. This Kubler-Ross model is often used in educational settings to teach students and train educators how not to misuse theoretical models.

Domestic Abuse Perpetrator Programmes (DAPPs) are dangerous to vulnerable mothers and innocent fathers. There is no evidence that these DA courses make any changes to attitudes nor behaviours of perpetrators whatsoever. Cafcass workers who do not understand DA, have overprescribed these DAPPs to unsuitable offenders and to innocent fathers because there is no threshold or valid assessment of suitability. Whacking any father on these courses has created a "Square peg in a round hole" fake remedy. This mutilation of the DAPPs has enfeebled their effectiveness and the perceived value of these courses. The DAPPs have become a tick box scenario, whereby real perpetrators will do it just to get off the hook, innocent fathers will fight it to clear their names and to protect their rights, and everybody downgrades it to a pointless hoop jumping exercise. The other issue is by overprescribing these courses, and having no real threshold of actual evidence, often, other than a fact-finding, which parents and experts in this field understand are fundamentally flawed, the DAPPs and Fact-finding hearings and access to Legal Aid, have created a system where claiming DA is advantageous to mothers. This has propagated false allegations and a ‘Mother who cried wolf’ scenario, whereby vulnerable mothers are not gaining the protection and support they need because of this blanket, tenuous and overprescribed Band-Aid.   

The Voice of the Child made a FOI request in December 2018, asking Cafcass

 “1. What is the success rate from these DV cases?”

The reply:

“CAFCASS does not have data on the success rate of Domestic Abuse Perpetrator Programmes (DAPPs).”

How can Cafcass even claim that DAPPs is an intervention if they have no means of evaluating the success of it. Any individual with even a rudimental understanding of interventions, educational courses, or any scientific process, will understand that unless you are evaluating and measuring your results, your endeavours are futile. This is the old ‘throw enough mud at the wall and some of it will stick’ attitude, or more to the point, throwing money into a fire and burning mothers and fathers in the process.

The DAPPs are used by Cafcass to create fake and misleading gender bias statistics. They do this by not recording the father’s safeguarding concerns in the first Cafcass phone interviews and by misleading cases from the beginning. Then they coercively force the father into a position of submission, whereby he is unlikely to see his children unless he attends a Cafcass Domestic Abuse course. If the father has attended this DAPP course, he is deemed as admitting to being a perpetrator of domestic abuse. Thus he is disadvantaged in the final hearing and is extremely unlikely to receive a fair trial or to gain equal access to his children. 

Often there is no evidence of domestic abuse and more often the misuse of flimsy evidence would not meet the criteria to even warrant a police investigation let alone a charge or conviction. There are reasons that we have the rule of law and democracy in the UK, secret abuse of fathers is not one of them. When we have social workers working in secret to effectively be their own rule of law and create their own punishments (withholding children), and their advice is used and predominately followed in the final hearings of family court, to decide what access parents will get to their children, we have a system which can only create injustice, discrimination and volatility at the core of unity, which is to say the family unit.

All of the unbiased literature on domestic abuse shows that domestic abuse is most often mutual combat and equally committed by both genders. Yet even if a mother has been found and charged with domestic abuse, they will not be directed to a Cafcass Domestic Abuse Perpetrator Programme (DAPP).

Shocked by this, On 22nd September 2021, I made a freedom of information request to Cafcass asking “Since CAFCASS was formed on 1 April 2001, how many times were Domestic Abuse Perpetrator Programmes (DAPPs) recommended for mothers and how many mothers actually attended / completed the DAPPs?”

Cafcass replied “Zero”.

I then asked, “If the Domestic Abuse Perpetrator Programme is not available to mothers, how do you justify this very clear gender bias?”

Cafcass replied “We are aware of the lack of available DAPPs for female perpetrators which has also been identified in an expert report named Assessing risk of harm to children and parents in private law children cases - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk We are contributing to a review of the current provision of DAPPs to ensure that they are effectively focused on reducing harm for children and families affected by domestic abuse. The outcome of the review, which is being led by the Ministry of Justice, will form the basis of a new commissioning specification, including the need for additional services beyond DAPPs and how to make DAPPs available to women.”

From this response it does seem that in the future Cafcass will try to be less bias, but I fear this is yet another appeasement to pacify the thousands of parents suffering because of the prejudiced reports and actions of Cafcass. The voiceofthechild.org article “Cafcass has been a disaster from Day One” explains how Cafcass was formed from the previous Family Court Welfare Service (FWCS) on a foundation of failings and injustices. This rebranding began in May 1995 and led to the formation of Cafcass on 1st April 2001. This rebranding took six long years, it begun because after an official complaint lodged by a ‘disenfranchised father’ the organisation was under public scrutiny. The FWCS with help, tried to silence this father, which led to parents across Britain lodging hundreds of complaints to FWCS, the Home Office and to the Lord Chancellor’s Department. The FWCS effectively rebranded themselves as CAFCASS and continued to abuse parents and children in the same manner. The reworking of the DAPPs by the Ministry of Justice is the beginning of the same cycle of rebranding a bad apple. This cannot solve the inherent bias deeply embedded into Cafcass.   

Cafcass’s Child Impact Assessment Framework (CIAF) makes it abundantly clear that the organisation itself does not understand Parental Alienation (PA) and does not record PA as coercive control. The Child Impact Assessment Framework contains anti-father rhetoric such as “other forms of harmful parenting due to factors like substance misuse or parental mental health difficulties where these are assessed as harmful to the child.” This carefully crafted wording (parental mental health) subliminally re-enforces the bigotry found throughout all of Cafcass’s practices and much of its policies. This is one example of thousands.  

In an organisation which has gender bias literally rooted into its policies and management of cases, how can any case that Cafcass are involved with, expect anything but gender bias outcomes and misleading data? Why is Cafcass still operating under such bigotry which directly violates human rights under articles 6: Right to a fair trial, 7: No punishment without law, 8: Respect for your private and family life and 4: Protection from discrimination. This is not only wrong in law, its discriminatory and morally corrupt. Under such conditions even if a rogue Cafcass worker tried to be unbiased, they could not. 

I can solve the problem of Cafcass with no extra funding at all. Defund Cafcass, redistribute the funds to Local Authorities and rebuild a system of fairness as Cafcass were literally built on a case of bigotry.

CAFCASS have a 96% bad rating. As most statistical studies have a 95% confidence interval for a given population, it is statistically improbable for any parent to experience anything other than the 96% have, which is to say, likely to rate the experience as bad.

In 2018 a Change.org petition asking the government to investigate CAFCASS policies, family court transparency and training for child welfare professionals, accumulated over 116,000 signatures. This was debated in the House of Commons, led by Labour MP Jess Phillips. This debate focused on cross examination of alleged victims of domestic violence by alleged and proven domestic abuse offenders and CAFCASS training. It predominately focused on a female or mother gaze and was instrumental in making some progress for mothers and children in the Domestic Abuse Bill 2021. Yet over three and a half years later, parents and children are still suffering the misfeasance and nonfeasance of Cafcass, and this petition did little to fix the overall failings of Cafcass.

Most mothers and fathers going through family court, feel let down and failed by Cafcass. With both sides of the gender wars feeling this way, is it safe to say Cafcass are warmongering? Pitting mothers and fathers against each other and prolonging family court cases in the meantime? Does family court have a political value, in the way that terrorism and fear does? And if so, does this value stimulate the prolonging of family court cases and increased acrimony, once Cafcass are involved? 

To be fair to Cafcass practitioners, if this were the case, they wouldn’t be privy to this information. They too would just be pawns. Also, to be sympathetic to Cafcass workers, what they are being asked and expected to do, is far beyond the capabilities of trained and even senior social workers. The job, which is expected of a Cafcass worker, if they were to do it properly, which they seldomly do, entails elements of psychology, mental health, law, policing, childcare, social care, detective work, management, domestic abuse specialising and even Judgement as judges play ping pong with responsibility, batting it back to Cafcass. Why are social workers being asked to perform such an array of roles and responsibilities with so little expertise nor training in these matters, under policies and frameworks which are not even-handed?

I for one do not feel safe to have my daughter near Cafcass again, let alone have them make decisions which are likely to affect her for the rest of her life. And now Cafcass want agency staff to make these decisions and reports!

On 22nd of September 2021 I made a Freedom of Information request to Cafcass. I asked “1, Since CAFCASS was formed on 1 April 2001, how many Section 7 Reports has the organization performed?”  

On the 19th of October 2021, Cafcass replied with these figures

“2018/19- 20,033,

2019/20 - 21,510

2020/21- 20,766”

This data shows a decrease in the number of section 7 reports from last year by nearly a thousand cases, it also shows only around 700 more cases since before the pandemic began. So I ask, where is this ‘braking point’? I state that this appearance of ‘braking point’ is internally generated for financial self-interest of Cafcass and does not have the welfare of children at its heart.

I asked Cafcass

“6, how much does it cost taxpayers for a section 7 report to be produced?”

Cafcass replied “Section 7 Reports are produced internally by Cafcass, or at a cost of £650.00 per report.”

In 2020/ 2021, This totals £13.4979 million of taxpayers’ money which is squandered on reports which are not being produced correctly, have no ability to be fair, have 96% bad rating and there is evidence that these reports are generic copy and paste jobs.

I asked Cafcass “11, Are the recommendations of a section 7 report a generic set of recommendations, copied and pasted into each report?”

They stated, “No. They are the Family Court Adviser’s recommendations as to what they think would be in the best interests of the individual child.”

Yet, I have reviewed many reports which suggest to me that much of the recommendations are generic copy and paste jobs with a few lines of generic personalisation.

Social work experts have also raised concerns about the suitability of newly qualified social workers (NQSW) for Cafcass’s new training programme. If senior social workers are not able to understand the complexities of family court and producing section 7 reports, how are inexperienced workers going to cope? One of the many problems with the section 7 reports is the Cafcass workers merely go through the motions, not applying the laws, not applying the welfare checklist or Practice Direction 12j. Asking newly qualified social workers to cut one's teeth in the deep end, where children are most at risk, is asking for more deaths like that of poor baby P. Tragically it takes a case like Victoria climbié or baby P to change legislation, policies and organisations.

Between April 2020 and March 2021 Cafcass received a total of 45,780 new private law cases. This figure shows a 0.8% increase compared with the previous financial year. Between April 2020 and March 2021 Cafcass received a total of 17,581 public law applications. This is a decrease of 459 cases, which shows a decrease in public law cases of around 2.5%. Let’s add both Public and Private law cases together. Between April 2020 and March 2021 Cafcass received 63,361 cases. Between April 2019 and March 2020 Cafcass received a total of 63,734 cases. This is a decrease in total number of cases of 373 case or 0.59% decrease. Yet two months later Cafcass were granted an extra £8m which is 6.45% increase of that total £124M. Five months later Cafcass are facing an overspend of £2.7M. Cafcass cannot regulate its own funds, never mind individual family court cases.

Today’s family law reported “In September’s Cafcass report, total year-to-date figures reveal a decrease of 3.5% in new case demand compared to the same period last year. This also represents a decrease of 9.5% in public law cases and 1% in private law cases.” So if we are over the hill of the COVID related increase, which let’s face it, has been overhyped by Cafcass for financial self-interest, then why are Cafcass still asking the Government for more money?

The below tables show Cafcass case figures from the months of May to Sep, from 2018 until 2021.

 
Public law cases received
Year
2018
2019
2020
2021
May
1,736
1,622
1,435
1,362
Jun
1,486
1,456
1,559
1,483
Jul
1,591
1,740
1,729
1,475
Aug
1,616
1,499
1,459
1,259
 

 
Private law cases received
Year
2018
2019
2020
2021
May
3,636
3,854
3,333
3,500
Jun
3,393
3,616
3,759
3,953
Jul
3,680
4,260
4,516
3,735
Aug
3,945
3,727
3,671
3,362
Sep
3,427
3,718
4,166
3,623
 

These tables show that there hasn’t been a significant increase of cases during lockdown nor following lockdown. In fact the highest figure of these months was May 2018 for Public Law cases (before COVID-19) and July 2020 for Private Law cases. Total case numbers for both are lower now than they were in May 2018 when these tables began, and when I believe Cafcass’s demise began. So where are all the ‘braking point’ extra cases? The extra cases don’t exist and catching up on work doesn’t require a bailout of £2.7M. Longer duration of family court proceedings due to the impact of Covid-19, (backlogs) shouldn’t be a big issue to a professional Governmental organisation. Nonetheless, family court and Cafcass had the privilege of being able to continue to operate remotely throughout the whole of COVID-19. Much of Cafcass’s work during this period was remote. This working environment afforded Cafcass extra working time from reduced commuting to many different family homes, work and locations. Indeed, turning on a laptop in the conservatory at home is far less taxing all round, than attending family homes or courtrooms. But Cafcass still did do home visits. The milkman still delivered milk; most people worked to some degree during most of the pandemic. Cafcass were able to work, less for the closing of contact centres. But if you recall the start of this petition, in 2019 -20 Cafcass drew down from sponsors, additional funding of £1.866m for contact services. Therefore they cannot blame contact centres as they had nearly 2million extra for contact services. The initial phone interviews with Cafcass are all remote, all of the court hearings have been remote. The one major matter Cafcass had to do, was generate section 7 reports. Of which, many have been produced remotely, indeed I had to tell the Cafcass worker who produced my section 7 report, that I wouldn’t be happy with a remote report, so she came out and actually observed me with my daughter and actually spoke to me face to face.

I ask is there a real backlog? And if so, why hasn’t this been managed? Cafcass are a central government organisation being funded at least £124M a year to protect and manage the welfare of children and parents but can’t strategize to solve problems where most other sectors have, with considerable ingenuity, technological and digital advances and simple problem solving. Yet these are the people who are to dictate to parents and Judges on how our children should live, where our children should live and who our children should spend time with. This big bad backlog can be solved by reduction in pointless direction hearings, Judges making actual decisions and judgments, and getting rid of Cafcass and their pointless delays and courses. Cut Cafcass clean out of the family court equation, and you cut the case durations by years.

The Nuffield Foundation 2015 study (How do County Courts share care of children between parents?), conducted by a collaboration of University of Warwick and University of Reading, which is often mis-analysed and seems to make excuses for the failing of family court, states “Time taken in the courts process should not be viewed as unnecessary delay. Cases need time to build trust between the parties and reach a safe, workable child-centred conclusion.” Thus excuses for delays and prolonging family court cases, far predate COVID-19. ‘Backlog’ and ‘braking point’ are the evolution of excuses for inadequacy, failing and prolonging cases. The truth is family court has a political value and is a lucrative economy, and our children are the commodity.

To save money, why don’t we expurgate Cafcass out of family court and save most of the squandered £13.4979 million spent on copy and paste job, section 7 reports. This can be done by making the new and unbiased educational material of both The Separated Parents Information Programme (SPIP) and the Domestic Abuse Perpetrator Programmes (DAPPs) and further courses available and mandatory as online courses, for all parents going through family court child custody disputes, both for private and public law cases. It would cost a small fraction of this £13 million to produce and maintain these courses, and this would reach and psycho-educate far greater numbers, guaranteeing a professional level of delivery, saving the family courts a great deal of time and redirecting millions of pounds to local authorities who are better placed to understand and support the families who need help and support. 

 It is reported that “The MoJ increased its funding for Cafcass by 3.4% to £135.7m in 2021-22.” Why fund the beast when it is apt to bite again?

This is £135.7m of taxpayers’ money being spent on a broken organisation which cannot manage its own funds, does not have the courses, policies or ability to be unbiased, is loathed and rated bad by most parents, has never been adequate from its inception, and was established on bias grounds. The only arena of civilisation which could rival Cafcass for its negligence and misfeasance of the welfare of children and families is the family law arena itself, of which is equally in crisis and is the biggest threat which western civilization has ever faced.

I state that we are on the precipice of a barrage of terrible cases like the baby P case, because Cafcass have never been adequate, and this is catching up on them. Fake it until you can’t make it, because children die. I believe that Cafcass are anticipating the same and are passive aggressively blaming their failings on funding because the house of cards is apt to fall, and children will die. I estimate that perhaps mid 2018 was the beginning of the end for Cafcass. There are indications of this. In the year 2018/19, Section 7 Reports produced by Cafcass jumped by 1,352, reaching over 20,000 for the first time and has stayed over since, which is most probably unsustainable at a cost of well over £10M a year and likely to increase. The mid 2018 MP Jess Phillips debate shows significant public concern and an increase of public pressure. Soon after this the world came to a grinding halt because of COVID-19. Although there is a backlog of cases because of COVID, the pandemic is likely to have saved Cafcass a few more years by diverting public attention. Lockdown and COVID also gave Cafcass a half believable excuse for their failings. Shortly before my estimate of Mid-2018, the deplorable 2017 evergreen state college protests marked the epoch of protests and change in many matters including gender equality and gender politics. As family court is at its core, gender politics, this undoubtably highlighted a need for change in family court and Cafcass. Anarchy and civil rights movements have been spawning, non-stopped since. It’s only a matter of time and unity between genders until we see an anti-family court and Cafcass protest march descend on London, and I shall be there. WE STAND!

It took the ‘disenfranchised father’ and the FWCS scandal six years of relentless public scrutiny and hundreds of complaints before the Home Secretary, Jack Straw decided to act out of damage limitation to rebrand the child welfare services, creating Cafcass. The Operation Of The Family Courts By Great Britain Parliament House Of Commons Justice Committee report is quoted as saying “The haste with which CAFCASS was established was a serious misjudgement”. Perhaps it will take six years from mid- 2018 until Cafcass are defunded and abolished. That gives us at least another painful three years of Cafcass abuse and failings. I don’t wish to wait three years to throw the bricks of bastille, post pandemic is a good time for new beginnings.

Political change takes 5-10 years as well as much public, media, subject experts’ pressure and political backing, or a catalytic event, such as the cases of Victoria climbié (before Cafcass) or baby P. I believe that several of these catalytic cases are progressing right now. Some of which take a form similar to the case of the Cafcass social worker Suzi Smith, who admitted sabotaging a case of a single father by falsely accusing him of sexually assaulting his daughter because he criticised the Cafcass workers handling of the case. I state that I have knowledge of a few cases of Cafcass sabotage and dishonesty on a scale similar to the Suzi Smith false allegations case, each of which could be the catalytic case for the downfall of Cafcass and change in family court.

Hundreds of thousands of parents are signing small petitions to have CAFCASS defunded and abolished. So many parents cannot all be wrong, something isn’t right, this is clear as day. The problem is the petitions are not funded, not united, are often gender-siding, are not being supported by our MPs and are not followed through with advertisements or campaigning.

I urge mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, sisters and brothers, MPs, Judges, Solicitors, Barristers, social workers, and anybody else who cares about our children and our civilisation to sign this petition to defund Cafcass and redirect the funds to Local Authorities so we can rebuild an honest, fair and safe family and children’s welfare system to support family court, and the revolution we parents will bring in that domain next. 

If you do not feel that you are fully able to support this petition but would like to enact change in the way Cafcass operate or would like Cafcass to be replaced, please make complaints to:

Cafcass at https://www.cafcass.gov.uk/contact-us/

Judicial Conduct Investigations Office (JCIO) at former.JOH@judiciary.uk

Home Office at public.enquiries@homeoffice.gov.uk

Lord Chancellor’s Department

And please explore other avenues to complain. Please make them sincere and plentiful to drive political change. We live in a democratic state, it is our right to complain when we feel we, or our loved ones are mistreated. Please do not give in to the fearmongering which aims to subdue our complaints and our rights.  

 

Please sign my petition to defund Cafcass and redirect the funds to Local Authorities.

 

Thank you for your Support,

 

Your sincerely,

Jack out-of-the-box (A loving father).