MoJ accepts need to abolish court fees in care proceedings

The government has been forced into a climbdown over the high fees that local authorities pay to bring care proceedings in the courts, accepting a recommendation from an independent report that the charges should be abolished.

The report's author, Francis Plowden, concluded that the costs of bringing proceedings, including the court fees, can deter councils from bringing proceedings.

The court fees were significantly – and controversially - increased in May 2008, based on a Treasury objective of charging for services in the public sector and to increase the proportion of costs of the Courts Service paid for by court users.

At the time the government said the move would promote the efficient allocation of resources, improve decision-making and accountability, and mean that the cost to authorities of court proceedings and alternative social services interventions are set on a comparable basis. To help finance the fees, £40m per year was transferred from the Ministry of Justice to local authorities.

The Plowden report was commissioned after the Laming review into child protection in the light of the Baby Peter case.

The report found:

• while it was difficult to disentangle the various influences at work, the Public Law Outline “was a greater influence than fees in explaining the fall in the overall volume of care proceedings in the middle of last year”
• while the fee increase was a very sharp one, the total sums involved are small as a proportion of the overall costs of safeguarding. However, they form a larger proportion of proceedings than they did previously and can be more easily influenced than other costs of safeguarding
• there is no evidence that proceedings are initiated prematurely or unnecessarily, “rather, to the contrary”. The judiciary are “strongly of the view that the reverse is the case and that social workers can wait too long before initiating proceedings”
• it is “hard to believe” that resource issues play no part at all in decision-taking. “In addition, while the fees are relatively small in overall budgetary terms, they are large enough for authorities to take sometimes elaborate steps to avoid paying them by ensuring that another authority pays, or by avoiding the final part of the staged payment”, and
• if resource issues do play a part, then the increased courts fees – although they are not the full cost as intended – have contributed to them.

Recommending abolition “with appropriate adjustments to MoJ and local authority budgets”, Plowden said:: “Whatever the precise level at which the full cost fee is set and irrespective of the arguments in favour of cost recovery in other areas of justice, it is hard to see that there are any compensating advantages in the present arrangements in either public expenditure terms or, more importantly, the difficult task of safeguarding vulnerable children.”

The author also suggested that claims that many judges and magistrates are too willing to accede to requests from other parties for additional assessments – of the children, the parents and other potential carers - “may merit further investigation”.

The government said the fees would be abolished in April 2011, when the next three-year funding settlement for English local authorities begins.