LAST Wednesday, the Government introduced the Courts and Tribunals Bill. Among other things, it repeals the presumption that children benefit from the involvement of both parents. The presumption, contained in section 1(2A) of the Children Act 1989 since 2014, required courts to assume that a parent’s involvement in a child’s life would further the child’s welfare, unless the contrary was shown. The repeal is in Clause 17.
Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice Baroness Levitt KC explained the thinking: ‘Being a parent is a privilege, not a right: the only right which matters is a child’s right to safety’.
That sentence deserves to be read slowly. It is not a policy adjustment. It is a philosophical declaration. The Government is signalling to every mother and father in this country that their involvement in their children’s lives has no presumptive standing in law – that it must be justified, case by case, to the satisfaction of the state.
The stated justification is child protection, and the campaigners who pushed for this change deserve a hearing. Claire Throssell lost her sons Jack and Paul when their father killed them during court-ordered contact in 2014. Women’s Aid has documented 67 children killed over 30 years by a parent who was a perpetrator of domestic abuse in circumstances relating to unsafe contact, including 19 between 2015 and 2024, a 50 per cent increase on the previous decade.
These are not abstract statistics. They are dead children, killed by a parent the courts should never have trusted. The system that was supposed to protect them failed them.
But here is the question the Government does not answer. The presumption being repealed did not apply where there was evidence that a parent’s involvement would place the child at risk of suffering harm. The safeguards were in the statute. The Government’s own Ministry of Justice review found the presumption was seldom the driver of judicial reasoning, even when it was referenced, and that it was court culture and professional practice, not the law itself, that failed those children.
The National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) judgment analysis commissioned as part of that review confirmed the point.
So the law was not the problem. The professionals who applied it were the problem. And the Government’s solution is to give those same professionals more discretion, not less. Who, precisely, decides whether your involvement in your child’s life is a net benefit? The same Children and Family Court Advisory Support Service (Cafcass) officers, social workers, and family court judges whose failures the review catalogued. They would operate without even a statutory starting point that says children benefit from knowing both their parents. Without that starting point, outcomes will depend entirely on the instincts and assumptions of whoever happens to be assigned to the case.
The Government says repealing the presumption will signal cultural change. But if the problem is culture, change the culture directly – through training, accountability, and evidence standards – rather than deleting the principle that safe parental involvement is normally good for children.
This should concern anyone who has been watching the direction of travel.
In Scotland, the SNP attempted to assign a state-appointed ‘Named Person’ to every child, regardless of whether there were any welfare concerns. The Supreme Court found the information-sharing provisions incompatible with Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights in July 2016.
The justices observed that ‘the first thing that a totalitarian regime tries to do is to get at the children, to distance them from the subversive, varied influences of their families.’ The Scottish Government eventually abandoned the statutory scheme.
In England, the Government’s new KCSIE 2026 safeguarding guidance, now out for consultation, can be read as repositioning schools as the primary authority over children’s moral formation, with parents cast less as partners than as risks to be managed. The consultation document is here.
I set out the case in detail here.
Wales criminalised all physical punishment of children in March 2022, removing the defence of reasonable chastisement under the Children (Abolition of Defence of Reasonable Punishment) (Wales) Act 2020.
The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill proposes a compulsory register of home-educated children, treating parents who choose to educate their own children as requiring state monitoring by default.
And in gender medicine, serious weaknesses in clinical assessment and safeguarding exposed by the Cass Review showed how easily parents can be sidelined when professional culture treats their involvement as optional.
Each of these measures can be defended individually on its own terms. Taken together, they point to a consistent pattern: the state replacing parental judgment with professional discretion, and treating the family not as a relationship to be supported but as a risk to be managed.
The US Heritage Foundation coined the term ‘bureaugamy’ to describe how the welfare state has progressively replaced the role of the father. The concept applies far beyond American benefits policy. When the state presumes that it, rather than the parent, is the default guardian of a child’s interests, it has already assumed a parental role. It has become the co-parent that nobody elected and nobody can divorce.
This is where marriage enters the argument, and not as an afterthought. Marriage exists to do what no government department can: it binds a mother and father to each other and to their children before any crisis arises, before any professional assesses whether their involvement is a net benefit, before any court weighs the evidence. It is the institution that says this child has a mother and a father who made a permanent, public commitment to raise them together. That commitment is not a privilege. It is not contingent on the approval of a Cafcass officer. It is the foundation on which everything else rests.
When Baroness Levitt says that being a parent is a privilege, she is articulating a philosophy in which the family is a creature of the state. When we say that marriage is the lifelong union of one man and one woman, we are articulating the opposite: that the family is prior to the state, and the state’s job is to support it, not supervise it.
The answer to that question will determine what kind of country we are.
