National partnership for Family Drug and Alcohol Courts set up with £280k backing

A group of private backers and philanthropists have pledged more than £280,000 over four and a half years to fund a new national partnership to support and extend the Family Drug and Alcohol Courts (FDAC) model across the family justice system.

The national partnership will be led by the Centre for Justice Innovation, working with staff from the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust and RyanTunnardBrown, who helped formulate the original FDAC structure and were involved in rolling out the model.

The move follows the closure of the FDAC national unit in September 2018, after the Department for Education said it would end its financial support.

A fundraising campaign was subsequently launched by the co-founders of Hall Brown Family Law following a meeting with the late Nick Crichton, the judge behind the first court, and the Earl of Listowel, who is one of the FDACs’ most prominent parliamentary advocates.

It was subsequently backed by LCM Wealth, which advises high net worth families; family law firm Family Law in Partnership; and AddCounsel, a provider of bespoke behavioural health programmes.

Together with other anonymous supporters, they have agreed to cover the costs of an initial six-month test period starting in April and – if the trial is successful – the part-funding of the new partnership’s first four full years of operation.

Writing on the Centre for Justice Innovation’s blog, Director Phil Bowen said: “Our mission is to create a team that sets up new sites and improves practice in existing sites, ensures that practice is shared between FDACs, coordinates data collection and uses it to improve operations through operational research, and provides a national voice for and promotion of the FDAC model.
 
“There is no dispute about the value of the work undertaken by the FDACs since they were first established. They get to the root of difficulties faced by parents struggling with substance misuse using a therapeutic, problem-solving approach, giving vulnerable children a better start in life, keeping families together and saving taxpayer money. The FDAC National Unit was instrumental in growing the FDAC network from one pilot court in London to 13 such courts across the UK during a decade in which the number of applications to the family courts for care proceedings actually doubled.”

Bowen added: “We now have the means to reinvigorate efforts to spread the benefits of the model far wider and to work with others in both national and local government as well as in the judiciary to secure additional funding and support for FDACs to carry out their work well into the future….

“Even though ministers were unable to provide funding in the summer, we appreciate the previous role of Government in fostering the growth of the FDAC network and remain hopeful that they will be able to contribute to their continued growth once more.”