---

Family Justice

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his support for the proposals. He asked me a number of specific questions. Are we proposing that members of the general public be allowed into the courts? No—and to that extent, this regime is more restrictive than the one that applies in the youth courts. However, I think that that is appropriate, although we are open to representations, if necessary, on the issue. Will parents be able to discuss their cases with MPs? Yes, and in my experience they do already, although often in breach of some extraordinarily complicated and convoluted rules, which I discovered only very recently. One of the issues is about the identity of expert witnesses should be able to be made public. My default setting is that they should; I believe that in cases of this kind, the expertise of such witnesses should no more be allowed to go without scrutiny than the expertise of those in other cases, in which equally life-threatening or life-changing decisions are made and expert witnesses have to justify publicly their expertise and judgments. We are seeking to overturn the part of Clayton v. Clayton that says that in principle the protection of the privacy of the child should fall away once the proceedings have finally been completed. We intend to reverse that, so that the presumption is the other way. There was a huge consultation on the increase in family court fees. Local authorities had a transfer of £40 million from the Ministry of Justice budget—and a little more, I may say—to meet the full costs of that transfer of fees. I would have preferred the transfer to have been ring-fenced to the local authorities so that they could use it only for these purposes. The local authorities are themselves root and branch opposed to ring-fencing—but they have had the money. It therefore does not lie in their mouth to complain that they cannot afford the fees: they can. Moreover, the fee is £4,000 on average; it ranges from £1,750 to £4,825, and the full fee applies only at the upper end. Local authorities have to base their decisions on the interests of the child. The fee, even at £4,000, is a very small proportion of the total costs of taking a case, which average £25,000. It is a still smaller proportion of the costs of taking a child into care, which are £40,000 on average and rise to £101,000 and more if the child is taken into secure accommodation for a year.