Yet even a cursory examination of the workings of the family courts reveals that almost no attempt at all is made to see that the family courts operate in a reasonably just, effective and sensible way.

There are several barriers in the way of any attempt to discover whether or not the decisions made are in fact in the best interests of the child. The first and the most formidable is that the family courts operate in secret. The blanket that covers what takes place in the family courts is so impenetrable that there is no systematic research about the effects of their decisions: no one except the judge, and the affected family (occasionally not even the family) is allowed to read the secret court documents.

It takes a knowledgeable, and rich, parent to challenge a decision, and thereby get it scrutinised by a judge in a higher court: most parents who have their children taken away are neither rich nor knowledge­able about the law. The inevitable result is that most decisions handed down by the family courts escape any kind of scrutiny at all. It is virtually impossible even to identify when there has been an unjust decision, never mind to put it right.

What evidence there is, however, points towards one conclusion: the system, and the law which underlies it, does not protect and promote the interests of many of the children with whom it deals.

One example is the extent to which it furthers the formation of single-parent families. Every year tens of thousands of children in England and Wales have parents who fight in court about how custody should be divided. A very large proportion of those children will lose contact with one of their parents within two years. Family law and the courts which implement it are largely responsible for that result.

It is a startling fact that there is no presumption in law in favour of ensuring that children have reasonable contact with both of their parents. As a consequence, any consideration, no matter how trivial, can, in disputed custody cases, be used to stop all material contact with the non-resident parent: if the resident parent sets contact with the non-resident at a pitifully low level, it can take years of litigation to get permission from the courts for the first overnight stay. No wonder that many thousands of non-resident parents give up the struggle, losing all meaningful contact with their children. One wholly predictable result is that thousands of de facto one-parent families are created every year — with incalculable social conseq­uences, almost all of them bad.