FIDDLING THE FAMILY FACTS
Lord Irvine's department, Melanie Phillips
argues, has suppressed evidence that shows why the new divorce legislation will not work
THE LORD Chancellor may not realise it, but the Family Law Act is in deep trouble. The problem is simple: it's unworkable. Moreover, research being commissioned by the Lord Chancellor's Department appears to indicate as much. So says the former deputy director of this research project. The trouble is he's been sacked, and finds his account of this research is being rubbished. The Lord Chancellor, however, is being told by his civil servants that the research indi- cates that the Act, whose starting date keeps being postponed, is on course.
The postponements, however, show that all is far from well. The root of the prob- lem is that the Act's procedures, which are supposed to channel unhappy couples towards mediation and counselling, are fundamentally flawed. Their incoherence was obvious during the measure's passage under the Major government. This was convulsed by the unexpectedly ferocious fight over its abolition of fault as grounds for divorce, leading to the claim that divorces would be easier and marriage fur- ther undermined. To neutralise this criti- cism, the government sold hard the idea of mediation and counselling services, which sounded warm and woolly and implied that unhappy couples might just be thus persuaded to think again about divorce.
This procedure was to be triggered by information meetings complete with video presentation, which conjured up a 'Since you're experiencing all the side effects it shows the tablets are obviously doing the trick' grisly image of a divorce cinema, or possi- bly a kind of mass Moonie-style nuptials in reverse. Parliament objected to such group meetings on privacy grounds, and so the Act accordingly said that each war- ring couple must have a separate meeting. Organising thousands of separate ses- sions, however, was bound to be a logisti- cal nightmare and would cost a fortune. And to what end? The purpose of such meetings was confused. Was it simply to provide information to people who were thinking of divorcing about how best to do it, or to save marriages? If it wasn't to save marriages, what was the point of spending so much money? If couples got to that point, it was surely very unlikely such meetings would make them think again. Until the information meetings were sorted out, though, the Act's proce- dures couldn't come into effect. A desper- ate proposal to separate the meetings into two, floated in the recent Green Paper on the family, has now been shelved too. Divorce lawyers are beginning to wonder what's going on. The answer is that the government is thrashing miserably around on a hook left for them by the Tories.
Into this confusion has erupted the sack- ing of Dr Anthony Agathangelou. In September 1997 he was appointed deputy director of the Newcastle University team piloting and evaluating information meet- ings around the country. Dr Agathangelou says he was horrified to discover that this work was of very poor quality. It was, he says, badly designed, was not rigorous and displayed a poor grasp of statistics. It was also, he claims, not independent of the Lord Chancellor's Department, which was closely involved in setting up and managing the pilot meetings. When he raised these con- cerns, he says, he was told he was being destructive and was squeezed out of meet- ings. He brought his anxieties to the dean of the faculty. A day later he was suspended and then sacked. A university tribunal threw out most of the allegations made against him but upheld his sacking on the grounds that he had not disclosed that he had been sacked from his previous job at Nene Col- lege, Northampton. Dr Agathangelou claims that no one at Newcastle had ever asked him why he had left it.
So why had he been sacked from Nene? According to Dr Gillian Evans, a Cam- bridge don who supported Dr Agath- angelou through both incidents, he had merely complained about the standard of management of research at Nene, and had been sacked for no good reason. Moreover, although the Newcastle tribunal said he should have disclosed what happened, it also made a point of saying that he had been 'unreasonably treated' by Nene.
Newcastle claims that Dr Agathangelou only started complaining about the stan- dard of the research after his suspension. Drs Evans and Agathangelou say emphati- cally that this is untrue. Dr Agathangelou says he was in increasingly acrimonious dis- cussions about his concerns with the pro- ject's director, Professor Janet Walker, for several weeks, culminating in his com- plaints to the dean. His central claim is that the Lord Chancellor's Department was intent on glossing over some of the serious disadvantages of the Act and wanted to use the research to justify anything it wanted to do. Accordingly, he says, difficulties with the information meetings were continuous- ly brushed aside. Advice that information In the meetings' video and leaflets was wrong was ignored. The team, he claims, was forbidden to discuss the paucity of mediation services revealed by a separate research project in Bristol. And, despite the Act's stipulation that each meeting Should be separate, group meetings were trialled — which he says were so unpopular that few people turned up to them. The most significant problem, however, was that the pilot meetings used volunteers Who were likely to react very differently from the couples for whom the Act was intended. Concerned about this possibly fatal flaw, he says, the team asked Profes- sor Peter Dolton to investigate. Here accounts widely diverge. Dr Agathangelou says Professor Dolton produced a summa- ry of his findings which stated unequivocal- ly that this problem meant that 'no useful generalisations' could be drawn from the research. More money was then obtained from the civil servants for Professor Dolton to assemble a new and better sam- ple of 1,200 people, but only eight came forward. Professor Walker vehemently denies this account. Professor Dolton, she says, merely outlined a problem common to much research and recommended aca- demic 'modelling' to overcome it. He did not say the research was useless, and there was no attempt to gather a better sample. Dr Agathangelou, she said, simply misun- derstood Professor Dolton's findings. But She refuses to release them for inspection. Moreover, Dr Agathangelou — who claims he was one of only three people who read the Dolton findings — says that when he was allowed back into his office to pre- Pare for his tribunal he found all his docu- ments had been removed and his computer files wiped. When he asked for them back, he was told they belonged to the Lord Chancellor's Department, a curious situa- tion for 'independent' research. When he asked the department for a copy of Profes- sor Dolton's report, Lord Irvine himself replied that it hadn't brought to light any research limitations of which the depart- nient was not already aware. But had Lord Irvine himself read it — or was he merely ,re.laYing what his civil servants had told will? Until such documents are produced, the suspicion must remain that millions of Pounds are about to be spent on flawed Procedures which were never more than a fig-leaf to save Tory face over family policy.
Melanie Phillips is a columnist for the Sunday Times.
Previous page
