Simon Hughes, the newly appointed Justice Minister, has put his support behind the Government’s plans to make mediation mandatory for couples going through the divorce process. The proposal is contained in the Children and Families Bill. The bill went through its Report stage on 17 December, and is expected to become law in April this year. It places a requirement on anyone seeking a court order concerning child or financial matters to first attend a mediation assessment and information meeting. The minister said that “mediation works and we are committed to making sure that more people make use of it, rather than go through the confrontational and stressful experience of going to court.”
At Hampshire Mediation we welcome the Minister’s endorsement of family mediation, particularly after the downturn in the number of people attempting family mediation which followed the Government’s imposition of restrictions on the availability of public funding in divorce cases. This unexpected reduction in people seeking family mediation seems to be nationwide, and family mediators are at a loss to explain the change. It has denied thousands of couples the advantages of using family mediation as an alternative to lengthy, acrimonious and very expensive litigation. Recent figures published by the Ministry of Justice show that the average cost of resolving a family dispute following the breakdown of a relationship is £500 per couple when using family mediation, but this figure is £8,000 if the matter comes to court. The same report also showed that the average time for a case to be resolved through family mediation was 110 days, but that the time taken to progress the same issue through the courts was 435 days.
Children and Family Mediation
Time and money aside, particularly when there are children involved the cooperative nature of family mediation allows matters of finance, property and the arrangement for those children to be resolved with the minimum of confrontation, reducing the burden of stress of what is, without exception, an extremely difficult and challenging time. Not only does this reduction in the level of conflict have a positive effect on the couple who are separating, it is also not lost on any children that might be involved. Children, almost without exception, hate to see their parents separate; it is likely to be the worst experience of their lives and one which they may struggle to understand. If the children see that the parents are still able to work together to agree on matters which directly affect them, the level of stress for them is greatly reduced and they will begin to see that, even though everything is changing, their parents are acting together and in their best interests, and both will continue to be a part of their lives.
