Divorce centres: Progress report

We have been monitoring the progress of the new divorce centres.

Recently Twitter has seen a few comments about the operation of the new divorce centres. Below are a few examples:

South West Regional Divorce Centre taking just under 2 weeks 2 process #divorce petitions apparently. So no change from the old ways then.

— M Bataillard-Samuel (@M_Bataillard) July 7, 2015

Also told BurySE #Divorce Centre are sending applications out to local courts to issue to ease the demand/backlog #frustrating #familylaw

— Shelley Cumbers (@Shelley_TSP) July 7, 2015

Family law solicitor and arbitrator,  Tony Roe, who made a series of Freedom of information (FoI) requests of the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), and whose research broke the news that  Bury St Edmunds would be the single divorce centre for the London and the South East has been speaking to HMCTS. Roe said, ‘I put these comments to HMCTS and received the following reply:

"We remain on track to complete the transfer of work to the Divorce Centre in Bury from the 45 London and South East courts by October 2015. Staff recruitment is taking longer than we had anticipated so we are deploying additional resources from the Region to support the Divorce Centre over the next few weeks. Our short-term aim is to process all work within a maximum of 5 days."

Roe added, 'HMCTS hopes for economies of scale, not to mention a better service. Before centralisation, the Service said that there was a backlog of 600 petitions in Brighton and Guildford going back three months, contrasting sharply with, what we hope are, teething troubles caused by current staff shortages. Hopefully the vacancies will be filled relatively quickly to remedy these.'

Read Tony Roe’s account of Divorce Centres and how they are operating in the August issue of  Family Law.