Recent heartbreaking evidence revealed one in five children from a broken home, loses touch with the parent that leaves the family home within just three years, and never sees them again.

Many more lose contact with a parent as they grow older, most often with fathers, when mothers have custody.

Ministers in the UK have decided reform is necessary.  Children’s Minister Tim Loughton announced that the Government is to rewrite the 1989 Children Act, which states that the child comes first in law courts in the UK.

The Government will consult on how the law should change, but its preferred option is for courts to be required to ‘work on the presumption that a child’s welfare is likely to be furthered through safe involvement with both parents’.

Unless staying in touch with either their mother or father threatens a child's well-being,  children must have an equal right to a proper relationship with both, ministers say.

The move is designed to ensure that the parent who moves out of the family home - typically the father - cannot be cut out of their children’s lives following an acrimonious separation.

Ministers say they also want to ‘put a rocket under the courts’ to ensure that parents who flout court orders about access or care arrangements are punished.

Courts are to be told to deploy existing but rarely used sanctions more often, including fines, unpaid work or imprisonment.

‘We need to clarify and restore public confidence that the courts fully recognise the joint nature of parenting,' said Tim Loughton, Children's Minister.

‘Parents must understand that enforcement action is available and will be used where necessary to ensure... contact decided for the benefit of the child,’ the Education Department’s consultation paper says.

The Government’s announcement overturns the main finding of a family justice review conducted for the Government by businessman David Norgrove, published last November.

It concluded that giving fathers shared or equal time, or even the right to maintain a meaningful relationship with their children ‘would do more harm than good’.

Read the full article originally published in the Daily Mail here. 

The Situation in Australia

'Custody' is an outdated concept in Australia and we now talk about shared parenting regarding who the child lives with and with whom they spend frequent and regular time.  

While I believe we are ahead of the UK in how we handle family law matters, particularly in the area of shared parenting, there are still many who use the children as pawns in their separation. 

There are those who go onto completely ignore Parenting Orders, withhold access to the children and generally alientate the other parent.

Anecdotal evidence suggests to me that this type of behaviour is common in Australia. It is usually the mothers who are withholding access.  Some of those mothers have very legitimate concerns for the safety of their child having escaped from violent and abusive marriages.

In their position, it's likely I would be trying to withhold access too. Many, however, do not have good cause and unfortunately, due to the time it takes to pursue and costs involved, many fathers just give up rather than pursuing a breach of Parenting Orders through the courts.  

There is much discussion in Parliment at the moment, lead rather brazenly by Senator Pauline Hansen, about an overhaul of our Family Court system.  

Do you think Australia should be considering the measures such as the UK is considering, which might include withholding passports or driving licences and ordering curfews requiring an offending parent to remain at a specified address between certain hours?