Private law family cases now take around nine months, and Cafcass caseloads have hit a five-year high

Private law proceedings are the cases where separated parents cannot agree arrangements for their children and one of them applies to the court. They are the route almost every father who loses contact eventually ends up taking, and the length of time they take is not an administrative detail. It is the substance of what goes wrong.

The numbers

Across 2024 the family courts dealt with 44,494 private law cases at an average duration of 41.8 weeks. In the first half of 2025 that figure was 39.7 weeks across 20,075 cases, and Children Act private law cases concluded between January and March 2026 took an average of 35 weeks.

The trend is downward, which the Ministry of Justice can point to legitimately. It is also still around nine months, which for a child of six is an eighth of their life and, as the Public Accounts Committee has put it, the equivalent of a full school year spent in uncertainty.

Demand is rising faster than the system is clearing it

Cafcass, the body that advises the family court about children, received 42,172 private law children’s cases in the year to March 2026. That is 8.2% higher than the previous financial year and the highest annual total since 2020-21.

At the end of March 2026 Cafcass had 29,313 open children’s cases involving 46,501 children, an increase of 6.5% on March 2025, with open private law cases up 9.2%. By the end of June 2026 open private law cases were 9.5% higher than a year earlier.

What the Public Accounts Committee found

The committee has examined family court backlogs and concluded that children and families are being let down, criticising what it described as a lack of urgency from government. Its report on improving family court services for children sets out the position in detail.

This matters more in private law than the raw numbers suggest, because delay is not neutral between the parties. Where a child is living with one parent and contact with the other has stopped, every month of delay entrenches the arrangement that exists rather than the one a court might order. The parent who has the child benefits from delay. The parent who does not is asking a court to disrupt a status quo that the court itself created by taking so long.

Delay does not hold the position. It decides it.

What would actually shift this

The committee has pressed for a credible recovery plan with published trajectories rather than aspirations, and for the Ministry of Justice and Cafcass to be held to them. Beyond that, the obvious structural point is that interim contact arrangements are treated as a lower priority than final orders, when in a system running at nine months the interim arrangement is functionally the outcome for most of the case.