Source · Select Committees · Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 2
2
Accepted
Assess and report on improving accountability for family justice system by December 2025.
Recommendation
The family justice system is complex, but excessive fragmentation hinders transparency, leading to poor accountability for service improvement and overall performance. The family justice system involves many organisations across government and the independent judiciary. There is no single body accountable for overall system performance, including delivery of the statutory time limit of 26 weeks for most public law cases. The FJB, set up to improve performance across the system, was supposed to meet quarterly but only met on average 2.5 times a year from June 2018 to December 2024 and has no overall strategy to improve family justice. The Board set six priorities for the family justice system in 2024–25 but did not monitor one of these at all. There is a lack of transparency about how, and by when, departments expect the six priorities to be delivered. Neither is there an effective mechanism to hold individual bodies to account. 3 The purpose of Local Family Justice Boards is to help improve services locally, but these local boards have no accountability, are not resourced and their performance is variable. recommendation MoJ and DfE should assess the strengths and weaknesses of the current accountability arrangements for family justice, and report back by December 2025 on how this might be improved, including: • how accountability can be strengthened across the system by consolidating current responsibilities or increasing transparent reporting; and • how both departments can better support the Family Justice Board nationally, and Local Family Justice Boards locally, to improve performance.
Government Response Summary
The government accepted the recommendation, agreeing to assess current accountability arrangements for family justice and report back to the Committee by December 2025 with plans for improvements and better support for Family Justice Boards.
Government Response
Accepted
HM Government
Accepted
The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation. weaknesses of current governance arrangements with a view to improving accountability and transparency, along with better supporting the National and Local Family Justice Boards. Departments will write to the Committee in December 2025 outlining their plans. billion for the Families First Partnership programme. This includes: • Continuing the £523 million investment available in 2025-26 for each year of the multi-year settlement. • £319 million from the Transformation Fund announced at the Spending Review. • New funding of £547 million over the Settlement. 3.8 The plans and investment will ensure children can remain with their families, support more children to live with kinship carers or in fostering families, and fix the broken care market to tackle profiteering and put children needs first. This work, particularly in the pre-proceedings space, will drive down demand in the family court, as fewer children end up in care proceedings, and ensure that cases ending up in court are better prepared through: • The implementation of the social care commitments in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, including new Family Group Decision Making and Multi-Agency Child Protection Team measures. • The Family Help and multi-agency child protection reforms, delivered through the Families First Partnership Programme, which combine the best elements of evidenced programmes into a single delivery model to create a seamless, non-stigmatising offer of support delivered by multi-disciplinary community-based teams. Family Help will prioritise earlier intervention and maintaining consistent relationships between children/families and practitioners. • Investment enables local authorities to undertake large-scale system transformation. It will also mean local authorities can recruit more Family Support workers/ Family Help Lead Practitioners who can then spend more time with children and families, or fund commissioned services such as mental health or domestic abuse work. Details were published in March 2025. 3d. PAC recommendation: [MoJ and DfE should take steps to improve efficiency in family justice systems and processes by:] • putting in place arrangements to learn from and embed good practice. 3.9 The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation. 3.10 The forthcoming family justice strategy will set out further detail on where there is scope to go further and how arrangements to learn from and embed good practice can be strengthened when published in April 2026. The strategy will be developed in collaboration with key partners across the family justice system and will reflect the important role that Local Family Justice Boards play in driving local improvement and aligning national priorities with local delivery.