The Ministry of Justice has recently published statistics on activity in the family courts of England and Wales for the period April – June 2015.

Family courts deal with cases such as: parental disputes, local authority intervention to protect children, matrimonial cases such as divorce petitions, the financial provisions for children after divorce or relationship breakdown, domestic violence remedies and adoption.

Key findings of the report include:

• The number of cases that started in family courts in England and Wales in April to June 2015 rose 4% to 59,908 compared to the equivalent quarter of 2014, but the recent trend remains steadily flat. Nearly half of new cases are divorce cases.
• The average time for the disposal of a care or supervision application made in April to June 2015 was 29 weeks, and the trend over the past year has remained stable at this level.
• 56% of care or supervision proceedings were disposed of within 26 weeks, following on from the 26 week time limit for completing these cases introduced in the Children and Families Act 2014.
• There has been a general upward trend in the number of applications for non-molestation domestic violence remedy orders since the end of 2012, but there has been a drop since the end of 2014 suggesting that the trend may be stabilising.
• There has also been a general upward trend in the number of adoption orders issued since 2012, rising to an all-time high in July-September 2014, but in the most recent quarters the number of orders has dropped.
• There has been a gradual upward trend in the total number of applications and orders made under the Mental Capacity Act 2005.
• There were 128,804 Lasting Powers of Attorney (LPAs) in April to June 2015, the highest quarterly figure since records began and an increase of 50% since the same quarter in 2014. This is largely due to increased publicity and new online forms which have been introduced to make it simpler and faster to apply for LPAs.

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

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