Family courts are “not good enough” and have treated women and children unfairly for decades, a government minister has said.
Announcing a major overhaul of the family justice system in England and Wales that will play a central role in “rebalancing” the family courts, Alison Levitt said often brutal legal showdowns will be replaced with a “problem-solving”, child-focused model.
Part of a move across the Ministry of Justice to tackle court backlogs, the department said child focused courts – which centre on child welfare and seeks out-of-court resolutions – have reduced child trauma, cut a backlog of cases and reduced waiting times.
They will now become the standard model for all section 8 cases, which involve child arrangements including where that child lives, who they have contact with and how long they spend with each parent.
The Labour peer, who was Keir Starmer’s principal legal adviser when he was the director of public prosecutions, said that she had been repeatedly accused of sexism since she became a minister last autumn, including as a result of the proposed repeal of the legal presumption that both parents should be involved in their children’s lives in the Courts and Tribunal bill, which passed its second reading earlier this month.
Levitt said: “It is historically so obvious that women have been victims [in the justice system], that there is a justification for putting in measures to bring them up, to make it fairer for them,” said Levitt. Change had to come “throughout the justice system, including in the family justice system, to make sure that [victims] are not, for example, being retraumatised by going through the family courts”, she said.
Asked if she believed the justice system treated women fairly from what she had observed since being called to the bar in 1988, Levitt said it was “more complicated” than the system being sexist, but added: “I think that women have not received fair treatment, but things have been improving. And do I think that it will be fairer still by the end of this parliament? Absolutely.”
Campaigners for family court reform have long argued that abusers use the family courts system to control their ex-partners, including by making counter allegations in an attempt to “alienate” the child.
After a series of scandals about unregulated and sometimes unqualified “experts” in parental alienation, Levitt said the concept was “not something that’s capable of definition or of scientific proof in any way, shape or form”.
Asked about the treatment of victims of domestic abuse in the family courts, she said: “It is just not good enough … Whenever we leave office, the situation in terms of violence against women and girls will have improved because it’s an uncivilised way to behave. It’s just unjust. You can’t care about justice if you don’t care about this.”
Giving the example of “fact-finding” hearing where victims were “cross-examined up hill and down dale”, Levitt said: “I don’t see [stopping] that as being sexist. I see that as rebalancing. If you’ve got an injustice to start off with, it’s not sexist to try and put that right.”
Levitt said further measures in the Victims and Courts bill – which remove parental responsibility from those convicted of a serious sexual offence against any child, and where a child is born of rape – would also give greater protection.
Ministers say the child-focused courts pilot, which was introduced under the last government in Dorset and north Wales in 2022 and has expanded into 10 more of 43 court areas, will now be rolled in a further 13 with the remainder to follow before the end of this parliament.
The justice secretary, David Lammy, said the new model would help families and children in disputes more quickly. MoJ figures show that the average time a court took in Birmingham dropped from 53 days in the three months to August 2023 to 23 days in the same period in 2025; the open case load fell from 1,456 in August 2003 to 648 two years later.
“For a child, every additional month waiting to find out where you will live can feel like forever,” he said. “This approach has delivered striking results in pilots, cutting backlogs in half and resolving cases up to seven-and-a-half months faster. For a child living through family breakdown, and for victims of abuse, that difference is life-changing.”
Unlike the old system, the new model would see family circumstances – including allegations of domestic abuse – examined ahead of court, with Cafcass, Cafcass Cymru or a local authority and independent domestic violence advisers involved from the start, he said.
The pilot also sees Child Impact Report ordered at the start of a process – a move Andrew McFarlane, the president of the family law division, called a “gamechanger” because it gave courts an early understanding of the impact the dispute on the child and resulted in fewer hearings which benefited “families and indeed the whole system”.
Lisa Harker, director of Nuffield Family Justice Observatory, said the expansion was welcome, but added: “It is important that we measure how children experience proceedings and whether their lives improve, not just how quickly decisions are made.”
