DadTalk

Children win legal right to see both parents after divorce.

Children are for the first time to be given the legal right to have a proper relationship with both their parents after a divorce, The Telegraph can disclose.

Ministers intend to rewrite the law in an attempt to ensure that fathers get improved access to their offspring after a marriage breaks down.

Currently, family courts decide to leave children with their mothers in the vast majority of divorce cases.

Campaigners have long complained that without a legal right to see their children, fathers can be excluded, particularly when a split has been acrimonious. By creating the new right for children, ministers hope that judges ruling on custody disputes will ensure more equal access for both parents.

A ministerial working group will be announced on Monday to decide how the Children’s Act 1989 needs to be amended.

According to the Office for National Statistics, one in three children, equivalent to 3.8 million, lives without their father. Ministers are particularly concerned about boys growing up without a strong male influence.

Eight per cent of single parents in Britain are fathers.

The announcement will give hope to campaign groups that have argued for years that fathers deserve a legal right to more equal access after a divorce.

It will also overturn the main finding of an independent official review into family justice by David Norgrove, which reported in November. He concluded that it would be too onerous for judges to ensure greater equality of access.

Ministers are bracing themselves for a backlash from single mothers’ groups that are concerned about the possibility of aggressive fathers intervening in the lives of their children.

The working group, comprising education ministers Tim Loughton and Sarah Teather, and justice minister Jonathan Djanogly, has been asked to come up with proposals on how the law should be changed within two months.

One official said the Government wanted to remove any “inbuilt legal bias against the father or the mother” in the law. The official said: “This is about the children. Both parents should have a full and continuing role in a child’s life after they separate.

Read more at The Telegraph Website.