ROBERT LANGLEY CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER , CAFCASS

“ In the UK , and globally , we ' ve got an economic situation that is difficult , which has a knock-on impact potentially on government finances ,” Langley explains . “ So , there are underlying considerations to think about .”

There are also challenges in family justice more broadly , around the absolute numbers of children and families in the system , but also the delays in cases , which is in part a hangover from the pandemic .

“ We are dealing with about 11 % more children than pre-pandemic at the moment ,” Langley adds . “ So that ' s about 6,500 additional children . And of the roughly 34,000 open and active children ’ s cases that we ' re currently supporting , about 15,000 children have cases that have been open for more than 52 weeks .

“ If you imagine that in the context of a child ' s life , a year has a huge impact . The pandemic has been at the centre of increasing those case durations across the family justice system , which is really challenging for a group of organisations that are desperate to improve .”

There are huge plans in the future , Langley describes , including beginning to pilot artificial intelligence ( AI ) and background automation to free up staff time , while there are plans for a website refresh in the near future .

“ We ' ve got some really interesting irons in the fire to start testing out carefully what the role of AI could be ,” he comments , “ which I ' m really excited about because we ' ve been talking about it for quite a long time . But I think we might finally be able to actually do some projects to test out some of the theories .” “ Security is of course still incredibly important and we undertake a lot of work in the background , making sure everything remains secure .

“ I really want to spend some more time thinking about our environmental impact as well ,” Langley concludes . “ Reducing our footprint in various ways would be a great thing because we need to acknowledge that that ' s the context that we ' re all living in .”

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