Britain’s most senior family judge called last night for urgent action over a crisis in the family courts fuelled by increasing delays in child abuse cases and lack of funds.

Sir Mark Potter, President of the Family Division, delivered a devasting picture of a system under massive strain, exacerbated by a surge in work after the Baby Peter case.

One factor, he said, was the steady rise in cases involving ethnic minority families with language difficulties and complex cultural considerations that “substantially” added to the length and cost of court cases.

“As all judges can testify, the need for an interpreter can double the length of court proceedings,” he said.

Cafcass, the children’s court agency, was also suffering “considerable problems with shortages of staff, a lack of experienced guardians (social workers who act for children in care cases) and consequent delay in the allocation of cases”. Despite efforts to tackle the delays in providing reports in care cases, such delays had lead to a position which is acknowledged to be “unacceptable, Sir Mark said.

Even before the surge in work prompted by the case of Baby Peter, courts were experiencing mounting delays in the appointment of guardians and reporting, he added.

Sir Mark, giving the Hershman/Levy Memorial lecture to the Association of Lawyers for Children, said that at the same time as there were “serious delays” in the supply of reports needed for care cases, there was a “dramatic upsurge” in care proceedings brought by local authorities.

On top of the existing problems of delay, judges and court officials were now faced with the “formidable problem of accommodating this extra block of cases through an already strained system”. Sir Mark said that in the face of these problems, “urgent action” was necessary to deal with “hot spots” in delays around the country.

He and Government officials were already embarked on an exercise to ease the requirements needed in such cases to cut down time spent in obtaining reports, he said.

Sir Mark went on to warn ministers “forcibly” over their plans to reform legal aid funding in children’s cases and the “threat” posed in terms of both efficiency and delay.

If lawyers left this area of work, there would be a rise in people representing themselves and further delays caused by “inexperienced advocates undertaking more complex work”.

Hearings would be less focused and appeals more likely, he said.

He attacked the Legal Services Commission over a “discouraging lack of realism” in its apparent determination to disregard these warnings.

In its response to Lord Laming’s report on Baby Peter, the Government had pledged continuous improvement. But, Sir Mark said, there was no reference to the provision of resources or the “eventuality that a system already struggling under the constraints of limited and reducing budgets may prove unequal to task”. That “unfortunate omission” was a failure to acknowledge the “elephant which, if it is not already in the room, has already planted its front feet well over the threshold”.

Children giving evidence in trials about abuse are having to wait for more than a year before cases are heard, a report by the NSPCC shows. Crown Court trials involving young witnesses take even longer, the NSPCC found, adding to the stress of the children involved. The report, Measuring Up?, co-funded with the Nuffield Foundation, is the largest study conducted of young witnesses and draws on interviews with 182 children aged 5 to 19, parents and witness-support professionals.

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