Shared Parenting Scotland expresses concern over pressure on courts

Shared Parenting Scotland has written to the Lord President, Lord Carloway to give early intelligence on the pressure building up on the courts.

This comes after the organisation recorded a 50% increase in enquiries in June compared to the same month in 2019. 

An increasing number of those who get in touch are concerned about the consequent effect of Covid-19 on their case. They say it is not only proceedings but relationships that are being affected with months passing since a child last spent time with one of her/his parents.

In his letter to Lord Carloway, Shared Parenting Scotland’s national manager, Ian Maxwell, identified three particular issues: 

• supervised contact, with contact centres largely remaining unable to facilitate supervised contact of the sort that may have been ordered by a court as far back as November or December 2019 
• the build-up of completely new Section 11 contact/residence cases, which will add to the task of hearing the backlog of existing family cases 
• telephone hearings used to make initial considerations include only involved agents, but having parents present during a hearing is important, even if this through a virtual presence.

Ian Maxwell said: “Of course the judiciary doesn’t have control over contact centres, but we anticipate that the low availability of supervised or even supported contact for the purposes of a report to the sheriff or to facilitate observation by a child welfare reporter is hindering the work of the courts.  It is also leaving parents and children in a relationship limbo that has already lasted months and will continue much longer.

“With respect to a build up of new cases, many of our June enquiries were from separated parents who had informal arrangements before the start of the Coronavirus lockdown. Some of these agreements have broken down because of the stresses during this period.   We anticipate that this will lead to a surge of new court cases.

“We have proposed to the Lord President that the Sheriff Courts and Court of Session could seek to explore new ways of assessing all Section 11 cases quickly, making use of some of the experience gained during this extraordinary period.  

“Our impression at this stage is that the telephone hearings have been working well for those parties who have successfully presented an ‘urgent business’ case.  Of course, others are disappointed at not being considered sufficiently urgent. There appears to be a level of inconsistency between courts but the feedback on those that have taken place is largely positive.

“We suggest that it would be desirable to continue the practice of requiring short submissions for an initial consideration of the case as early as possible, so that an interim decision can be made on whether it is in the child’s best interest to resume contact.”