Family Proceedings
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what data the Department collects on the average duration of private law child arrangement proceedings; and what steps he is taking to help reduce those times.
Answered by Ministry of Justice
The Department publishes statistics on the timeliness of private family law cases, which include child arrangement proceedings, in the Family Court Statistics Quarterly publication. These can be found at the following link: Family Court Statistics Quarterly - GOV.UK.
We have made progress in reducing case lengths in the family courts. In January to March 2026, it took on average 35 weeks for private law cases to be concluded, down 5 weeks from the same period in 2025; however, we recognise that average case lengths remain higher than we would like.
The Ministry of Justice is working with cross-system partners to improve timeliness by increasing efficiency in the system and through the rollout of the Child Focused Courts model, which has been shown to resolve cases twice as fast as the national average. The Family Justice Board regularly monitors KPI data against performance targets it has set both regionally and nationally.
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