Child law update

The once-vaunted Public Law Protocol was supplanted in September by the new Public Law Outline (PLO). London, along with nine other areas—Liverpool, Portsmouth, Oxford/Milton Keynes, Birmingham, Leicester, Newcastle, Warrington, Swansea and Plymouth/Exeter—have been selected as “initiative centres” to pilot the outline.

A lack of pre-launch publicity has resulted in an alarming ignorance about the existence of the new outline, which is now being remedied in the piloting areas. A recent London meeting to explain the new procedures saw many practitioners (myself included) frantically scribbling down Mr Justice Ryder and District Judge Cushing’s pearls of wisdom.

AIM OF THE NEW OUTLINE

The aim of the outline is to reduce the inordinate delay between application and disposal suffered by children in care proceedings. Everyone accepts that the current care centre average of 51 weeks from application to disposal (42 weeks at Family Proceedings Court level) is far too long and has invidious consequences for the children involved, regardless of whether