Select committee: Public Accounts Committee
Conclusion 28
45th Report - Improving family court services for children
Published 12 Sep 2025
Addressed to HM Treasury
Public Accounts Committee Improving family court services for children All items in this report Report on parliament.uk ↗ Inquiry on parliament.uk ↗
Conclusion (the committee's words)
The new model reduces the number of court hearings and redistributes costs across the system.69 Evaluations from the two early pilots found that costs for local authorities more than doubled as social workers were involved in more cases, while the judicial cost halved due to a reduced number of hearings.70 Cafcass told us that its involvement in private law cases can be expected to increase from around 30% of cases to 80% under the Pathfinder model. It said that achieving this across the country would require around 200 more family court advisers. Wider roll out may therefore depend on reallocation of funding to support the necessary investment in Cafcass and local authority social workers.71
From: Public Accounts Committee, 45th Report - Improving family court services for children (HC 883), 12 September 2025
Government response
The government responded to the whole report on 4 June 2026 (deadline 12 November 2025).