The following speech was given by Lord Peter Jackson to the Family Drug and Alcohol Court Conferenceat Inner Temple in London on 22 November 2024.

I believe in FDAC. 

I will tell you why, once I have expressed some sincere thanks.  To all of you for coming from far and wide today.  To our speakers, and in particular to our FDAC graduate parent, Nawel.  To the Lady Chief Justice, the President of the Family Division and the Ministers, Lord Ponsonby and Janet Daby MP, for finding time for FDAC in their daunting schedules.  To the Chief Social Worker, Isabelle Trowler for attending, with her great knowledge of the issues.  To Callum Worsnop, the Head of Family Justice Policy and his team at the DfE for their sustained interest in FDAC.   To social work directors, such as Dr Mac Heath of Milton Keynes, who have the vision to find room for FDAC within their squeezed budgets.  To the Centre for Justice Innovation for its crucial role in promoting and sustaining FDAC, and to its patron Lord Falconer for supporting our work by his presence today.  To members of the press for taking an interest in our conference.  To academics and researchers, including Professor Judith Harwin at Lancaster University and Agata Miskowiec at Mutual Ventures, who have worked on the theoretical validity and cost-effectiveness of the FDAC model; and to Mary Ryan, now at the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory, who designed Nick Crichton's original FDAC, and to her colleague Jude Eyre.  To all the judges who have worked in FDAC over the past year, almost of whom are here today.  To their leadership judges, including the DFJ for London, Judge Khatun Sapnara, who made that possible.  To judges who do not yet work in FDAC but hope to do so soon.  To the FDAC teams who provide such a unique service.  To the parents who have had the courage to try to change their lives for the sake of their children.

These are the reasons for my belief in FDAC, after a year as its lead judge.

I believe in FDAC because it works.  The headline findings from the large-scale 'Evaluation of FDAC' published by Foundations in August 2023 bear repeating:

• 52% of children returned to parents (as against 13% in standard care proceedings)

• 28% of children went to family placements; the same percentage as in standard proceedings, but hardly any placements were contested, which makes them far better for the children than if they had to be fortified against the parents

• Parents are 4 times likelier to abstain, with benefits for the family and savings for the health service and criminal justice system

Parents do not fail in FDAC, but some of them are not ready to change.  Some never will be, but others will be ready later in the child's life, or maybe ready for a future child.  And one of the most beneficial aspects of the process is that parents who cannot manage will often reach that conclusion for themselves.  There will of course be sadness where children have to be placed elsewhere, but there is so much less bitterness.

I believe in FDAC because it is a responsible use of public resources. It cannot be said often enough, every FDAC case saves the public an average of £58,000 in state care costs, and £15,000 in legal costs.  The latter is because there are hardly any external experts (1 per 13 cases against 1 per case), half the number of legal hearings, and only 4% of final hearings are contested (as against 24%).  That is not just a financial saving, but it frees up court time to deal with other work and reduces delays.  Why then is FDAC not universal?  Because a budget-holder may not be confident of achieving an in-year saving, and because one form of saving is by stopping paying a bill and another is by not starting to pay one.  They come to the same thing in the end, but it seems to be harder to make a case for the latter.  That is why the matched central funding recommended by the most recent research commissioned by the DfE is so critical.

I believe in FDAC because it complies more fully with our legal obligations.  As I said in a recent talk at the Association of Lawyers for Children, our courts and the European Court of Human Rights have repeatedly said that removal into public care should be regarded as a temporary measure, to be discontinued as soon as circumstances permit, with the ultimate aim of reuniting the family.  Of course there will be cases where reunification is inappropriate, and the resources to achieve it are always finite.  There is of course an argument for spending all the available money on families at an earlier stage before proceedings begin.  But we know that for tens of thousands of parents, particularly those in the grip of addiction, early intervention may not be not the answer.  Yet many of these families do respond to the powerful combination of the FDAC team and judge working together, and it is for these families, and above all for their children, that FDAC exists.  FDAC therefore meets our legal obligations more fully than any other approach.  It does it as a form of therapeutic jurisprudence, two long words that just mean that the court tries to help.  The weeks of the proceedings are used dynamically to promote the potential for change instead of being an essentially static period with an often limited possibility of the parents moving on from the state of affairs captured, and all too often preserved, by the threshold findings.  The threshold is to be judged at the start of the case, but the welfare outcome is to be judged at the end, and the risk is that the period in between is sterile and that the threshold becomes a millstone.  There is so much to be said for professionals using their skills for the purpose for which they learned them, by building trust, rather than being seen by parents as strangers or even as enemies.  In care proceedings, the child's welfare and the parent's rights are often seen as being in tension.  That tension is much less apparent in FDAC, where the aim is to help the child by helping the parent.  The F in FDAC reflects an approach that considers the family as a whole.  The acronym can also be parsed as being For Detoxers And Children.

I believe in FDAC because children should have the same chances. There is obviously an issue of equity here.  It is vividly illustrated by two cases decided at the beginning of the year, about which I have spoken before. They concerned baby boys born 40 miles apart in the same week in June 2023 to parents with strikingly similar problems.  One was born in Gloucester, which has an FDAC, the other in Swindon, which does not (though, to rub salt in the wound, Wiltshire, which brings its proceedings in Swindon, does).  The Gloucester boy went home on trial in November and a supervision order was made in February, while a placement order was made for the Swindon boy in January, so he should by now have been placed for adoption. When making the supervision order, the judge at Gloucester (Judge Mark Tait) said that it could not have happened without FDAC, and when making the placement order, the judge at Swindon (Judge Caroline Wright) said that it might have been avoided with FDAC.  Their judgments are now in the Family Law Reports.

I believe in FDAC because it treats people respectfully.  Parents were overwhelmingly positive about their experience of FDAC, whether or not they got their children back.  Here are two Welsh parents, recorded in the assessment of the Cardiff FDAC that so sadly closed a year ago:

Everything they've done for me, I've needed... I found myself in a dark, deep hole. And they've dragged me out of that. I was doing a lot of substances for almost 20 years... And they've turned my life around for me, which I can't thank them enough for. – FDAC parent, not reunified with child(ren)

I feel like all courts... should have, maybe not an FDAC, but like a team, which are trying to do the same sort of thing for whatever that situation is. Because I feel like it, it would make not just the court system, but people which are on the lower end of life, become a bit more open with authority. And I think the country would run a bit smoother then on that side. – FDAC parent, reunified with child(ren)

Here is what a Welsh social worker said about their experience of FDAC:

Court generally is terrifying. It's nerve-wracking as a social worker, if you were a parent... it would be horrific, I think really... way of working it's far kinder, I think it's far fairer.

As we know, care proceedings can be completed without any meaningful contact between parent and judge, beyond the constrained process of giving evidence.  One FDAC parent who had been in regular care proceedings described the experience of sitting behind their lawyers and never interacting with the judge at any stage in the proceedings as – same word –'terrifying'. Compare this from an FDAC parent:

My Judge got to know me, I got to speak to her which really helped. I didn't feel like they were just words on paper... You believed in me, you saw me as a good person. I felt welcomed... I felt wanted and that I wasn't a burden.

Imagine what that parent would make of the court process if she was involved in non-FDAC care proceedings about a subsequent child.

The feedback from lawyers in Wales is interesting.  It was largely positive, but where there were any reservations, they came from the lawyers, and it is fair to record that some felt excluded from the process.  As one said'there is a very different power balance'. That might be so, but is it not a good thing for parents to feel more engaged and for therapeutic professionals to play a larger part, with lawyers only becoming more central when they case really requires it?  I have been involved with care proceedings throughout my career and am open to the argument that we lawyers have had things our own way for too long. 

I believe in FDAC because it benefits professionals.  By that I mean the FDAC team members, and also the judges.  Judge Andrew Berkley's research, which he will present later, shows how strongly FDAC judges feel about the value of their work.  I will leave that to him, but it really is a classic case of Portia's description of mercy as being "twice blessed: it blesseth him that gives and him that takes".   

I believe in FDAC because it shows what a justice system can be like.  It brings the better angels of our nature into the delivery of justice.  Judges who sit in FDAC report that it influences all their judging.  If FDAC expands, I believe that its ethos can be a strong influence on practice and procedure in the family court, and beyond. 

Lastly,I believe in FDAC because it is now ready to expand.  FDAC has been sustained by committed professionals and local authorities, with support from government from time to time.  But if it is to achieve its huge potential we must get beyond the present stop-start narrative, with individual FDACs opening and closing every year, and move to the point where it is not a sign of merit to have an FDAC but an embarrassment not to have one.  The decision about sustained funding is for others, but I hope the weight of evidence from judges at all levels, including the past and present Presidents of the Family Division, and now the Lady Chief Justice, will weigh heavily.  My personal view, after decades of working in this field, is that FDAC offers us the best way of achieving real culture change in our efforts to protect children from harmful parenting and equally to protect them from unnecessary separation from their families.  FDAC has indeed been resilient, but it remains worryingly small – perhaps available to only 2% of children in care cases.  There are many local authorities who would like an FDAC, and the judges in the family court are strongly in support.  We are at a moment in time, and I am reminded of the familiar lines:

There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;...
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.

I do hope that the current will flow in FDAC's favour and that when we meet next year, we can talk of how best to deliver the benefits that a greatly expanded FDAC will surely bring.

Thank you.