Welcome to another week.
As the government tries to address the challenges faced by parents and professionals in the family courts during the Coronavirus outbreak, families are highlighting ongoing problems with applications for urgent hearings and contact with their children.
Our question this week then, is just this: what challenges are you currently facing?
Researching Reform 
Hi Natasha, my issue I do that I requested weekly Skype contact to be reassuring presence for my children through this experience in the abscence of physical face to face contact. It was dismissed by court professionals and the judge said she could not see the benefit to the children. I find this astounding and beyond frustrating. I am in the process of writing to my MP Michael Gove regarding this. I wonder if you could point me in the direction of the Presidents guidance or advice regarding contact as I have been unable to find any unless it is child arrangement order, not a long term care order. I am being offered 30 mins Skype monthly which I feel is insufficient during this time when children need to know their parents are there for them. Many thanks
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Hi Kate, thanks for your comment and I’m so sorry about your experience. The only document offering guidance at the moment is this one, which isn’t very detailed when it comes to contact: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-guidance-for-childrens-social-care-services
It says:
“We expect that contact between children in care and their birth relatives will continue. It is essential for children and families to remain in touch at this difficult time, and for some children, the consequences of not seeing relatives would be traumatising. Contact arrangements should therefore be assessed on a case by case basis taking into account a range of factors including the government’s social distancing guidance and the needs of the child. It may not be possible, or appropriate, for the usual face-to-face contact to happen at this time and keeping in touch will, for the most part, need to take place virtually. We expect the spirit of any contact orders made in relation to children in care to be maintained and will look to social workers to determine how best to support those valuable family interactions based on the circumstances of each case.”
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My friend’s eight-year-old daughter is subject to a care order but is living with her estranged husband. My friend used to have a face to face supervised contact at a contact centre every two weeks for three hours. This has now been changed to video contact for half an hour fortnightly and email contact every other week due to coronavirus. My friend is in lockdown due to her medical vulnerabilities, she has no access to a smartphone and her computer is not good enough to enable video contact. She has asked for help with this but is being ignored. children’s services say that my friend can only email them once a fortnight and refuse to reply to any more than that one email. She had to email and call constantly just to get feedback on how her daughter is, she has not seen her since early March. My friend has always felt marginalised by Children’s Services, the IRO failed to organise a meeting with her for
the last LAC review in November. Children’s Services are telling her that she gets “feedback on her daughter’s welfare” at LAC reviews. They then tell her the next LAC review is in August 2020, more than nine months after the last one to which she was not invited. I know this should be six months maximum! How on earth do they expect a mother to wait that long to obtain information about her daughter’s welfare at such a crucial time? It always has felt as if they want to stifle my friend’s opinions, it feels even more so now.
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