THE President of the Family Division announced last week that the Government is committing £82million over three years to roll out a new Child Focused Model across 32 court centres in England. It is, we are told, the biggest change to family court proceedings in 30 years. The model is said to put the child’s welfare at the centre of hearings from the outset. Nobody could object to that. If it does.
But the announcement invites a question that nobody in government seems willing to ask. Why are the family courts drowning?
Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service (Cafcass) figures for January 2026 show a 19.5 per cent year-on-year surge in cases. Some 257 new children’s cases are entering the system every working day. Private law cases – the disputes between separating parents over who sees the children – are up 7.1 per cent year to date.
Part of the answer lies in a promise that was made four years ago and has been quietly broken. When the Divorce, Dissolution and Separation Act came into force in April 2022, removing the requirement to prove fault, the Government said it would take the sting out of divorce. Couples would no longer need to accuse each other of adultery or unreasonable behaviour. The process would be calmer, less adversarial, better for everyone – especially the children.
It has not worked out that way. Data obtained by law firm Nockolds from the Ministry of Justice shows that 10,300 financial remedy orders were contested in 2024, up from 6,191 in 2023 – a 66 per cent increase and the highest figure since 2008. The most recent quarterly data, covering October to December 2025, show financial remedy applications up a further 13 per cent year on year, while disposals fell 18 per cent. The backlog is growing.
What happened? Senior family lawyers have a name for it: displaced grievance. James Grigg, partner and head of family law at HCR Law, put it plainly in April 2025. He said: ‘Previously, being able to apportion blame at the start of the process by citing a spouse’s adultery or unreasonable behaviour was important to many people on a psychological level, serving as a therapeutic step in the healing process. The removal of fault in the divorce regime, as a legal concept, is straightforward. However, removing it from the human psyche is far more complicated.’
Grigg described a ‘noticeable increase in spouses using financial statements as a new outlet for blame, with allegations of bad behaviour creeping into documents where they hold little legal weight’. The result, he said, is ‘increased costs and delays’.
This is not a fringe observation. Resolution, the practitioners’ body that championed no-fault divorce, has itself acknowledged that grievance-expression through financial remedy documents ‘has become increasingly commonplace following the introduction of no-fault divorce, as the previous law gave people a way of airing their grievances outside of the financial remedy’.
In September 2025, Sir Andrew McFarlane (the same President of the Family Division who has just announced the £82million reform) wrote to the London Financial Remedies Court announcing significant cuts to sitting days. The Lord Chancellor required 45 per cent of family court sitting days to go to public law cases, squeezing out financial remedy hearings. The Financial Remedies Journal described the cuts as ‘savage’ and predicted a forced migration to private arbitration, creating what practitioners are calling a ‘two-tier justice system’: those who can afford private dispute resolution get timely hearings; everyone else waits.
The human consequences multiply when you set these court pressures against the wider collapse of marriage. The Centre for Social Justice’s I Do? report, published in February, showed that marriages in England and Wales have fallen from 400,000 in 1973 to 224,402 in 2023, the lowest figure since records began outside the covid years. Only 2 per cent of men marry by the age of 25, compared with 62 per cent in 1970. The relationships that have replaced marriage are far less stable: Marriage Foundation research shows that cohabiting couples make up 19 per cent of parents yet account for half of all family breakdown.
So we have a system in which marriage is collapsing, the relationships replacing it are three times more likely to fail, the divorce process that was supposed to reduce conflict has displaced it into the most expensive part of the proceedings, and the Government’s answer is £82million to redesign the courts. The Relationships Foundation estimated the annual cost of family breakdown to the taxpayer at £51billion in 2018, a figure that will have risen since. The Government’s investment amounts to 0.05 per cent of a single year’s bill.
What is missing from this picture is not money for courts. It is any serious attempt to understand what is happening to families and why. Remarkably, no quantitative study has yet tested the displaced grievance hypothesis. Nobody has compared the content of financial remedy documents before and after April 2022 to measure whether blame-expression has actually migrated. The methodology exists – Professor Emma Hitchings and Dr Joanna Miles developed a court file analysis framework for their Fair Shares project at the University of Bristol – but nobody has funded the work.
Until someone does, we are left with a policy built on hope rather than evidence: the hope that removing blame from divorce would make it less painful, the hope that £82million will be enough to fix the courts, and the hope that nobody will notice that the Government has no strategy at all for strengthening the institution that the evidence consistently shows gives children their best chance of growing up with both parents.
If any researcher or institution is willing to take on a properly funded study of the displaced grievance hypothesis, they should get in touch. The evidence gap is glaring. The question is whether anyone in a position to act would rather not know the answer.
