2.Main Content
2000 Family mediation
This page contains an outline of this research, and a summary of the key findings. Details of how to find the full report can be found at the bottom of the page.
Title
“Monitoring publicly funded family mediation – report to the Legal Services Commission”
What is it about?
In 1997 the Legal Aid Board (now the Legal Services Commission or LSC) began to pilot franchises for family mediation services. This meant that where people were eligible, the Legal Aid fund would pay for family mediation in disputes over children, finance and property when couples were separating or divorcing. The Family Law Act, passed in 1996 (but now repealed), also required those eligible for Legal Aid to have a meeting with a mediator to explore whether mediation was suitable. At the same time, the LSC set up an extensive research project to look at cost-effectiveness, benefits, quality assurance and other issues related to publicly funded family mediation.
Who did it?
The research project was a collaboration between the academic director Gwynn Davis (University of Bristol), and Gwyn Bevan (London School of Economics and Political Science), Robert Dingwall (University of Nottingham), Steven Finch and Rory Fitzgerald (National Centre for Social Research), and Adrian James (University of Bradford).
The research team had three main sources of information:
- They monitored and analysed all cases for 15 family mediation services in the pilot over an 18 month period.
- They conducted telephone interviews with 1055 individuals using mediation and lawyers, and in 646 cases also interviewed the person’s solicitor. They also conducted second interviews with 477 individuals, and 310 solicitors.
- They taped 148 mediation sessions in 89 cases, supplied by 15 different mediation services, in order to analyse the process of mediation itself.
Key findings
This is a detailed and thorough piece of research, with a wide range of findings.
The mediation caseload
- 85% of cases referred to mediation involve disputes about contact or residence arrangements for children.
- 33% of cases have financial or property disputes as one of the factors.
The parties’ attitudes
- 57% said that their former partner was not keen to resolve matters, and 59% believed that their former partner was “not at all willing to compromise”. Only 11% said this of themselves.
- 41% of women and 22% of men said that fear of violence had made it more difficult to resolve issues in their case.
- Most people seemed to accept that mediation was a good idea in principle; they were less sure that it would work in their case.
Solicitors’ attitudes
- Most solicitors claimed to be supportive of mediation, but said that few clients could be persuaded to try it.
- Solicitors had a much more limited perception of the scope of mediation than mediators did.
- All solicitors said that they adopted a conciliatory approach to family disputes.
The experience of mediation
- People’s experience of mediation was positive on the whole.
- There was a tendency for the not-for-profit sector to score higher satisfaction rates on questions relating to children’s issues, and for the for-profit sector to score higher on financial disputes.
- In children’s issues, 35% found mediation very helpful, 35% found it fairly helpful, and 71% said they would recommend mediation to others. Similar figures were found in financial disputes.
- The researchers point out that these results come from a group of people who have voluntarily chosen to use mediation.
The mediation process
- In around 50% of cases family mediation was confined to just one session.
- The nature of the mediation process was “strongly influenced by the issues under discussion”. The researchers concluded that mediation on property/finance is “so different from mediation on children issues that it is not clear that the skills required are of the same order”. They found a very wide variety of expertise amongst mediators in relation to property and finance issues.
- Mediators are expected to be impartial: the researchers found that although mediators refrain from directly expressing opinions, they indirectly impose “parameters of the permissible” which vary between providers and between individual mediators.
- The evidence of the taped mediation sessions was that allegations of violence during mediation tended to be marginalised, with a default assumption by the mediators that events were trivial or no longer relevant.
- Publicly funded mediation providers need to meet the organisational requirements of the Mediation Quality Mark and the franchise contract. However, there is considerable difficulty in knowing whether mediators are offering quality work, other than through these very indirect measurements.
Mediation agreement rates
- Mediation providers reported agreement in 50% of cases dealing with children issues, and in 34% of financial disputes.
- The parties using mediation reported agreement rates of 45% and 34%.
- There is a discrepancy between the 70% who found mediation helpful, and the less than 50% who made an agreement through mediation.
The experience of solicitors
- Having a solicitor on your side was highly valued by parties, but the researchers conclude that the picture of solicitors as aggressive troublemakers is an outdated caricature.
- Solicitors scored rather higher than mediators on “soft” measures of approval: 60% of parties found their solicitor very helpful on children issues (as opposed to a figure of 35% for mediators), and 54% (as opposed to 33%) on financial issues.
Longer term arrangements
59% of people said they thought they would be able to modify mediation agreements in the future, and 65% said they thought they would be able to modify solicitor-negotiated agreements. One of the claims made on behalf of mediation is that it improves the parties’ capacity to negotiate together in the future. The research concludes that, on this evidence, mediation does not deliver this any more effectively than lawyers.
The cost of mediation
The researchers found some evidence that making an agreement through mediation is associated with reduced legal costs, but there is no significant evidence that simply engaging in mediation was likely to reduce costs overall. However, the researchers point out that mediation ought to be judged on whether it offers something of value to those who engage in it, not just on whether cost savings can be made.
The full report will be available on the archive section of the LSC website when it has been re-organised. In the meantime information can be obtained from the Children and Family division of the LSC on family@legalservices.gov.uk
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