Thank you so much for coming back to London to be our guest speaker tonight. Thank you, Sir Andrew. Thank you all for coming. I can't, in all honesty, say how honoured I am to have been invited by the Treasurer of Gray's Inn to give this reading tonight because I am the treasurer and with enormous Hutzper, I nominated myself to give the lecture. But I spotted that in the current six-month period, I was retiring as head of family justice, and Sir Geoffrey Voss is going to retire in October as head of civil justice. And there are two big lectures in the Grayson calendar every year: this one and the Birkenhead lecture in November. And Geoffrey very kindly took my invitation to give the November lecture on the future of civil justice, and I'm giving this on the future of family justice. So it's not purely big-headedness and the need to hear my own voice that I've invited myself. And I hope what I have to say is of interest and value to you. The title I've chosen, There Must Be a Better Way, is a phrase that I've used a number of times previously on those occasions in the rather confined world of looking at how we deal in the court system and how society deals with supporting couples who are separating and need to make arrangements for their children. But this evening I'm going to use the phrase there must be a better way in a wider context and look at family law more generally. But in doing that, I'm not suggesting that there hasn't been substantial change in the family law world during the last uh four decades that I've been involved as a family uh lawyer. Uh some of those changes have happened through formal review processes with the Law Commission or Parliament or working together with wholesale change taking place. But others have been achieved entirely by judge-led developments, and I think particularly of the law relating to the division of matrimonial assets when a couple get divorced. My plea to find a better way isn't made because nothing's been done. On the contrary, I think we've got a proud track record in family law in seeking and making substantial changes across the board to keep pace with society, because in the end we're not really dealing with legal issues in the family court. These are relationship uh difficulties that people have got into, and the form and structure of relationships that individuals develop has changed remarkably in the last uh 50 years from the conventional set piece that will have been the experience of um everybody 50, 60 years uh uh ago. And I think family law is always playing catch-up, but we've got a proud record of making change down the years. I should say, as uh the provost has stressed, that I retired from the judiciary two months ago, and I'm enjoying myself. And so these are my own thoughts. They're not the thoughts of a judge, uh and they're not the thoughts of the judiciary more widely. And this is an address given to a general audience uh rather than one composed simply of family law anorex, no offense meant. And so I'm going to concentrate on the bigger picture and try to avoid too many references to specific cases or the detail of the law. But before going further, I need to manage expectations of what is now to follow. Firstly, because obviously in 45 minutes uh I won't have time to say everything that might be said about the future of family law, and therefore these are, as the subtitle of this evening's uh address uh suggests, simply thoughts uh about certain topics. But secondly, and more importantly, uh when preparing the first draft of this address a few weeks ago, I worked myself up into a real state, and I was ready to deliver the full Victor Meldrew outburst about the need for Parliament to look at and to reform three areas. Uh, the law uh on cohabitation, what we do to help people sort their finances out when they've been living together in a settled relationship. Secondly, the law on prenuptial agreements, and thirdly, uh financial relief on divorce more generally. Each of these has been the subject of thorough scrutiny and recommendations by the Law Commission, and each has been the subject of regular and sustained calls for reform down the years, and yet Parliament hasn't gripped it, hasn't looked at these topics uh at all, uh or not for very many years. Separately, my draft returned to a theme that I've spoken on before, namely the lead, the need to maximize enduring, potentially lifelong relationships for those who have been adopted and for those who are in life uh in long-term care. Well, during the past two weeks, the government has, in two separate interventions, done a good deal to shoot my fox. Firstly, by initiating a consultation process on financial relief, prenuptial agreements and cohabitation, and secondly by announcing a major initiative to move the focus of planning for children in care onto the maintenance of lifelong relations. Um thus you'll be fair that we spared the full victim eldroom, and I will not have to double the dose of my blood pressure medication. Um but the fact that, despite in what might mutually be called a busy political scene, um the government's decided to press ahead with these initiatives is very welcome. As they are so recent, I propose to summarize um the gist of them before offering a few preliminary thoughts of my own. But before doing that, as I've said, I'm going to just note some of the many substantial changes in family law that we've experienced in the last 30 or more years, starting with the Children Act in 1980. That was a watershed piece of legislation, not only changing the substance of the law in fundamental ways, but also developing concepts both in the way that the act was worded and the concepts of parental responsibility and other matters, which are now part of the DNA of the way we approach cases for children. But following that, we received the Adoption and Children Act 2002. There was a major family justice review in 2011, and that fed into what we do. There was the introduction of the Civil Partnerships Act in 2004, the Human Fertilization and Embryology Acts in 1990 and 2008, together with legislation concerning forced marriage, female genital mutilation, and gender recognition. If that wasn't enough, in recent times the Divorce, Dissolution and Separation Act 2020 and the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 have had a profound impact on both the process and the approach of the family court. These black letter reforms have travelled alongside softer developments such as a toolkit helping judges when they write to children to explain their decisions. Guidance on the approach that the court should take to allegations of alienating behaviour, where one parent says, Well, the children don't want to see me because the other parent has talked to them and alienated them from having a relationship with me. Guidance on the approach to neurodiversity in the family courts. The introduction, which has been most welcome, of a strong and clear voice from young people who've been through the family court, who form the Family Justice Young People's Board, and who contribute positively and effectively to all our deliberations. They have representatives at every conference that's held on family justice, and they are, they speak truth because they've walked the walk, sadly, of being in the system themselves. And we nearly, we have a nearly fully digitized court system in family justice now. And last but not least, we've had a move towards much greater transparency in the family court. So we haven't been standing still, and these are big changes, and changes that were rightly made and hopefully have bedded in and allowed us to move forward. But it's wrong to stand still, and because family law reflects society and society is continuing to develop, we've got to look at what we do and whether there's a better way of achieving outcomes for those who need to turn to the family court in their moments of need. The major government consultation, which was launched by the Deputy Prime Minister on the 5th of June, is entitled A Fairer End to Relationships and subtitled A Consultation on Reforming Financial Remedies on Divorce and Strengthening Protections for Cohabitants at the End of Their Relationship. It encompasses financial relief on divorce generally, has specific proposals for making certain prenuptial agreements binding, and promotes a new jurisdiction for courts to redistribute the finances of certain former cohabitants in to some degree in certain circumstances. Taking them each in turn, with regard to financial remedy, the principal aim of the proposed reform is to provide a clearer framework for divorcing couples and those who are leaving civil partnerships, to make it easier for them to resolve the financial issues themselves without going to court. The proposals acknowledge that whilst the applicable statutory provisions have largely been unchanged for 50 years since the Matrimonial Causes Act 1973, the approach taken by the court has changed very markedly during the ensuing half century. And the policy aim of the consultation is for there to be a codification of the current approach rather than any alteration to it, but also to add clarity to those areas where it's thought that matters may be less clear than they ought to be. And this approach is therefore described as codification plus, and it's based on recommendations in a Law Commission scoping study two years ago. By capturing the current judge-driven approach to, quote, matrimonial property, quote, sharing and quote needs, and encapsulating this in black letter law within a statute, the government aim is to make it clearer and more consistent and more accessible. There'll be a statutory overarching objective of achieving, quote, fairness, unquote. Matrimonial property would be shared equally as a starting point, unless there's a need to adjust that outcome to meet the needs of one or other party. The concept of compensation would be added to the checklist of factors in the new statutory scheme, and the welfare of any child would have to be the court's first consideration with legislation to protect the financially vulnerable, including victims and survivors of domestic abuse. The consultation encourages debate as to how domestic abuse should be evaluated as a factor by a court when determining the financial matters following divorce. And this is a hot topic within family law professionals at the moment. Hitherto, domestic abuse really hasn't featured. Even if someone has behaved in an extremely abusive way, when the court's been dividing the finances out, the courts have said, well, we're not concerned with behavior, we're looking at the future and the finances. That's changing. There have been a number of decisions recently that indicate that that's changing, and this consultation asks how that ought to be drawn into the scheme. The approach that was taken by the Supreme Court in the case of Standish and Standish last year in categorizing, on the one hand, matrimonial property and on the other, non-matrimonial property, is, says the consultation, to be adopted. But the armory of potential orders that the court might make is seen to be satisfactory and is to remain as now. So the launch of this period of consultation is an important moment in the evolution of our approach to the resolution of financial disputes. After a gap of more than 50 years, it's obviously right that the radical developments that we've simply got on with in the court should be the subject of debate, and if it gets that far, of a bill being introduced with scrutiny in Parliament. The aim of achieving greater clarity and predictability for divorcing couples is obviously a sound one, but the task of codifying the current approach without introducing fresh ambiguity will be a difficult one for the parliamentary drafting team. Any new act of parliament in any jurisdiction normally gives the lawyers and the courts a good decade of work, doesn't it, in teasing out its interpretation. And an obvious concern is the potential for codification, which is aimed simply at encapsulating what we're doing at the moment, unwittingly giving rise to a platform that ends up changing it. We shall see. Prenuptial agreements. The second element of the consultation concerns prenuptial agreements. For many years, some voices, particularly those of Baroness Deach and Baroness Shackleton and the House of Lords, have called for legislation to make some prenuptial agreements legally binding. The current law following the Supreme Court decision in Radmaca and Granatino in 2010 is that a properly constituted prenup should be given decisive weight in determining contested financial arrangements on divorce, so that the couple would be held to an agreement that's been freely entered into unless it would be unfair to do so. The Law Commission confirmed a recommendation that it had made in 2014, in 2024, in support of legally binding nuptial agreements. Under the government's proposals, a nuptial agreement will be a qualifying agreement if it is a valid contract. It's been entered into without undue influence or misrepresentation. It's made in a deed more than 28 days prior to the marriage or civil partnership, and there must have been material financial disclosure with each party having separate independent legal advice. So quite high stipulations before this will be a qualifying agreement. But if it is, then it's valid and binding. This is an important topic. I've been supportive for a long time of the campaign of the Noble Baronesses and the Law Commission's recommendations. The case for providing a default position whereby a valid, created, validly created pre- or post-nuptial agreement is binding, subject to exceptions, is clear, will give people greater clarity, and may well encourage more couples to focus on their financial arrangements when they get engaged at a more tranquil stage of their relationship than is often the case at present when we see them at the other end of the process. Cohabitation. In 2025, there were around three and a half million cohabiting couples in the UK. That's some 17.5%, nearly a fifth, of all families. That figure, which has been effectively static for some few years, is an increase of over 50% from what it was in 1996. In contrast to the sophisticated, flexible, and wide powers of the court at the end of a marriage or civil partnership, cohabitants are forced to rely upon a patchwork of legal rules drawn from property law, trust law, or contract law to try to pursue a financial claim if they wish to, against their former partner. The situation was described by the Law Commission in its 2007 report on cohabitation under the introductory heading, quote, Why is this issue important? And after noting that some 1.27 million children were being brought up by cohabiting couples in 2001, the Commission said this cohabitation is already a significant social practice. It's growing and continued growth is forecast. This is, of course, not in itself a reason for law reform, but if it is accepted that the current law is inadequate and gives rise to unwelcome consequences, the fact that these consequences potentially affect a significant and increasing proportion of the population is highly relevant. The issues considered in this paper are therefore not issues that will go away. We urge government to take the necessary steps to provide this increasingly significant section of society with legal remedies capable of dealing fairly with the financial consequences should they separate. And that was, as I've said, back in 2001. In a report published in July 2022, the House of Commons Women and Equality Committee focused on the rights of the cohabiting partners. In addition to pointing to the unsatisfactory patchwork nature of the measures identified in the Law Commission report, they also considered that the financial relief jurisdiction for the support of children in Schedule 1 of the Children Act was outdated and mostly benefited the children of wealthy parents. The committee also pointed to the fact that the position following the death of a cohabiting partner was significantly different to that of a spouse or civil partner. The idea that an enduring relationship will be regarded as a common law marriage, phrase we all know is a myth, is nevertheless widely held by the population as a whole. And furthermore, it's not uncommon in certain religious communities for there to have been a religious ceremony of marriage, but no parallel civil marriage, leaving the parties regarded simply as cohabitants under the civil law in the event of separation. The committee concluded that, quote, it is time the law adapted to the social reality of modern relationships while still recognizing the social and religious status of marriage, end quote. And that flags up the difficulty with this topic because the more you enhance or do anything to enhance the status of cohabitation, the more, it may be said, you're diluting the status of marriage. The problem of what to do in the court system and what remedies to offer cohabitants isn't unique to England and Wales. At a recent family law conference I attended of all three jurisdictions in the United Kingdom, and also with the representatives of the Republic of Ireland, we identify difficulties, albeit different difficulties, in the way the regime in each jurisdiction approach this difficulty. Where a child is involved, for me, there's a central, unanswerable question, which is why should the financial arrangements for that child and his or her principal carer or carers differ so radically depending on whether the parents were married or not. For the child, it will be a matter of happenstance whether or not he or she was born to a married and civil partnered parent or parents who are simply living together. Yet the financial arrangements available to the child's principal carer will often who will often be the mother post-separation will be unrecognizably different depending on that parent's status. Why should that be? How can that be justified as a matter of public policy? Of course, what should be done and how Parliament should reform the law to redress the imbalance is not an easy question to answer. But it seems to me that doing nothing about it cannot be a satisfactory approach. There must be a better way of making a proportionate and fair distribution of the finances of these families, while still maintaining a different status, an enhanced status, a gold status for marriage. The government's proposals for introducing some limited rights for former cohabitants to apply for an adjustment of their respective property rights following separation have been carefully couched so as to provide something more than the current lack of remedy, but significantly. Less than the rights that attach to those who've been married or in a civil partnership. An applicant, it's proposed, must prove that they've been in an quote enduring family relationship with their former partner. The consultation suggests that this should either be by establishing a period of at least three years cohabitation, or cohabitation where the couple are parents of a child, or a child has lived with them as a child of the family. Other factors are suggested and views within the consultation process are particularly sought on this topic. Any claim would have to be made within a statutory time limit, two years is proposed. The default position would be that the legal ownership of property should determine which partner maintained, retained that property. You get what you've keep what you've got. But the court would have jurisdiction to vary ownership where a case of need was established. The needs-based approach would prioritize the needs of any children, but needs would be interpreted more narrowly than it is in proceedings on divorce. And the aim would be for cohabitants to be achieving a clean break in their finances as a very clear goal. Inviting Parliament to consider enhancing the rights of cohabiting couples to any degree risks igniting opposition from those who seek to uphold the sanctity and status of marriage. The government is therefore keen to stress that it's adopted a proportionate approach in proposing these reforms. The need to preserve the distinct legal status of marriage is treated, as sorry, is stressed throughout the document, and in particular the court's approach would not include, for cohabitants, the sharing principle. For my part, these proposals are welcome. For the reasons I've given, I'm persuaded that it's simply not tenable for the financial support for children to turn on whether or not their parents are married, and for the level of support that a court may afford to them to be determined on such a radically different basis. Whether the same should apply to a childless couple or a couple who have lived together for only three years without children, is, however, a different matter. And no doubt the consultation process will tease out views on that. Moving on. It was with respect to private family laws, I've said, I've used the phrase there must be a better way, before. In a lecture in Jersey in 2021, I strongly promoted the recommendations of a report produced by the Family Solutions Group entitled What About Me. The Family Solutions Group had been established by Mr. Justice Cobb, I wonder what happens to him, as he then was in 2020, as a subgroup of the President's Private Law Working Group. And their report essentially listed the dozen or so steps that could and should be taken to provide support, information, education, and dispute resolution opportunities for separating parents completely outside the court arena. As I've said before, we in the court don't even know these people exist until they make an application for a court order. And by then, obviously, it's too late for us inside the system to be encouraging them to engage in any other form of dispute resolution, or simply to give them information about what their position might entail and what normal looks like. Any intervention, therefore, of the type that the Family Solutions Group described, must come from other agencies or from the government. My efforts as president to promote the FSG recommendations achieved a modest degree of success in that they were taken up by successive Lord Chancellors in the previous government and resulted in the publication in February 2024 of a statement of government policy entitled Supporting Earlier Resolution of Private Family Law Arrangements, Government Response, in which the then government accepted most of the FSG recommendations, including provision of online support and information, advice to separating parents available via local family hubs, expanding the quote, reducing parental conflict program, piloting early legal advice. Those of us long in the tooth will think of the Green Form scheme. Well, this will be a digital version of that. Online consultation, live consultation with a solicitor for two hours paid for on legal aid. Making parenting programs available without the need to go to court. For those of you who are not familiar, parenting programs is where separating couples separately go. He goes to one, the other partner goes to another, and they're with other parents, and they're shown videos, and discussion takes place about the impact on children of separation and how you might go about resolving matters. It's like a speed awareness course for parents. Strengthening dispute resolution and funding mediation. To see these initiatives being announced as government policy was a most welcome development. Despite the change of government, I understand that these proposals continue to be seen as sound. And despite the economic cycle and the presence of more pressing needs, which have inevitably intervened to a degree, work is well advanced, for example, on the provision of online support and information on the gov.uk website. Separately, the Ministry of Justice has continued to provide substantial funding for mediation vouchers for couples who wish to turn to mediation. The case for rolling out the remainder of the FSG proposals remains very strong. They will undoubtedly benefit children and parents who currently find themselves before the family court by default or through ignorance of alternative avenues of resolution. They will also save money and resources within the court system and allow greater and more timely focus on the cases that do need to come to court for reasons of protection, safeguarding, or the absence of any other option for resolution. Allied to the raft of non-court interventions recommended by the FSG, but arising from a completely different genesis, is the work of the Online Procedure Rule Committee, OPRC. The overall aim of the OPRC is an ambitious one. It is to create an all-inclusive digital environment for the resolution of any civil, family or administrative dispute, with the court seen as the final destination if no other resolution is achieved, but with the potential litigant having to undertake a digital journey before gaining access to the court or the tribunal, during which they will be exposed to a whole range of information, education, office of non-court dispute resolution services and other resources. As a member of the OPRC from its inception in 2022 until my retirement, I've been 100% committed to this project. As it happens, once the final important element of the private law portal in family is fully operational, the court side of family justice will be fully digitised and in a good position then to engage with the OPRC pre-court programs once these become available. But of course, those of you who are aware of matters in family law will know that the big news, notwithstanding last week's announcements in terms of change, is the government's decision to support the rollout of what are now called child-focused courts to the whole of England and Wales during the recent during the current three-year period. Child-focused courts, which had formerly been known as Pathfinder courts, have proved to be very successful in achieving safer outcomes for families and doing so significantly sooner than the current model. Developed as a result of the 2020 Ministry of Justice Harm Panel recommendations aimed at improving the family court's engagement with issues of domestic abuse, the child focus model turns on the production by CAFCAS, the Court Social Work Agency, or CAFCAS Cumrian Wales, of a full social work report before any hearing takes place in the court process. The Child Impact Report, as it's named, provides the parties and the judge or magistrate with a great deal of independently gathered information, including crucially the wishes and feelings of the child. Such information is normally only available in our current model to the court some six or eight months after the case has started, by which time a great deal of allegation and cross-allegation has often been raised by each party. In addition, the child focused model requires far greater engagement between the court and the local domestic abuse support services. The models currently in operation in ten of the 42 designated family court areas. For the government to commit 82 million pounds, which they have, to introducing the model in the remaining 32 courts, and doing so at the current time is a demonstration of the degree of confidence that there is in the child focused model. It is indeed a better way of achieving resolution for those families who need to turn to the court. Adoption. In recent times I've delivered two substantial papers on adapting adoption to the modern world. This evening is not the place to enlarge upon the history once again, other than to observe that our model of adoption was built to a large extent to meet the need for homes for babies who'd been born out of wedlock to unmarried women, at a time when it was not generally socially acceptable for those babies to be brought up by their mothers. This year marks the centenary of the first adoption act. It was passed at a time long before the advent of legal abortion or modern contraception. That was also a time when the understanding of child abuse was very limited. The supply of children for adoption then, which was plentiful, was largely made up of the babies, quote, given up, unquote, at birth by unmarried mothers, and seldom by older children who had any knowledge of their birth family, but had been removed to protect them from abuse. It was also obviously a time without the internet, without social media or WhatsApp. The law stipulated and still stipulates that an adopted child is to be treated as if born to the adopters and not born to any other person. It's an order made to last a lifetime. And the expectation was that the child will be brought up as the adopter's child without any knowledge of or contact with their natural family. And for much of the 20th century, this will have been entirely achievable. We see the results, don't we, on the television, in programmes such as Long Lost Families, where people in their 60s and 70s get to know that they have a brother or a sister and get to meet them on camera for the first time in their lives. Well, in the last 50 years, the world that I've described has changed out of all recognition. But our model of adoption and the underlying law have changed little. Children who come forward for adoption now are unlikely to be babies. The average age on adoption is currently three years and two months. These are children, and some of them are a lot older than that average figure, who will know their family, for better or for worse, and they will live in a digitized world where they can themselves, quietly in their room, in the adopted home, make contact with their family. So my plea has been, in the lectures I've given, for us to look at organizing the maintenance of some form of relationship between these adopted children and their birth family in a safe way, rather than having it as an unregulated time bomb ticking away in the adopted home, as it's sadly seem to be in many cases. But it's right to record that what I was saying in my lectures was really no more than to reflect what was already going on in social work practice. The need for a more realistic model of adoption is now widely recognized and is reflected by a more thoughtful and sophisticated approach to post-adoption contact, so that adopted young people grow up with some continuing knowledge of and relationship with at least some of their blood relatives, at least that's the hope. Groundbreaking work by the Family Rights Group, entitled Lifelong Links, is a project which has demonstrated the value of establishing just some form of continuing relationship with children who are in care. Lifelong Links connects children in care or care leavers with people who care about them. The aim of lifelong links is to ensure that a child in care or a care leaver has a positive, loving, supportive network around them that they can rely upon not only while they're in care, but will carry on once they reach maturity and move off into adult life. Well, on the 4th of June, Josh McAllister MP, the Minister for Children, issued an important policy paper entitled Enduring Relationships for Children in Care. The opening paragraph sets the tone and the goal. Quote, our ambition is a children's social care system where every child grows up with enduring, trusted relationships that provide stability and belonging into ad and belonging into adulthood, so they feel safe, loved, and able to thrive. This means that children's social care should nurture connections with families, friends, and other trust trusted and valued adults, both those that they hold when entering care and new ones that they encounter within care. End of quote. The document stresses the value of a child achieving a strong sense of identity so that they may reach and then move on into adulthood with confidence. This strong policy statement and the detail it contains is to my eyes extremely welcome. We're not simply looking after a child by having them in care. We, as any parent, are bringing up someone to be a sound, stable and secure adult. Young people leaving care often describe the experience in terms of stepping off a cliff edge. Enhancing relationships around these young people, relationships that endure beyond the age of 18, must surely be the right thing to be doing. It's of note, however, that this policy document is not concerned with adoption. Indeed, a word search on adoption does not produce a single reference within the text. Yet the need for those young people who are adopted from care to have enduring relationships is just as clear. It is to an extent what adoption is all about, about creating new enduring relations with the adoptive family and the adopter's wider family. But in terms of enhancing a young person's sense of identity, who they are, where they've come from, so that they can move into adulthood with confidence, surely there's a need also to look to maintaining an enduring link in terms of at least a tenuous relationship with someone, a member or members of the child's birth family, where that's safe to do. My final topic is surrogacy. Surrogacy is the practice whereby a woman carries a child for another person or persons, the commissioning parents, with the intention that the child is handed over to those commissioning parents at birth. The law relating to surrogacy in England and Wales hasn't been the subject of any substantive amendment for over thirty years. During that time, the public attitude to surrogacy has moved from regarding it as very much on the fringes, being largely confined to informal arrangements, to a position where it's now seen as properly part of the range of options available to those who seek assistance to become parents. The number of parental orders, as the orders are called at the end of a surrogacy case, in England and Wales in 2011 was 117, but in 2021 that figure was 435. The trigger for the enactment of the Surrogacy Arrangements Act in 1985 was largely concerned over commercial surrogacy following the case of baby cotton, which had grabbed the headlines the previous year. Commercial surrogacy is obviously where the surrogate mother or any agency that's assisted in making the surrogacy arrangements acts for profit. Thus, section two of the 1985 Act makes it a criminal offence in England and Wales for anyone to initiate or take part in negotiations with a view to making a surrogacy arrangement on a commercial basis. And section three prohibits any advertisement, indicating a willingness to take part in a surrogacy arrangement. The legal mechanism by which a child born by surrogacy is treated in law as the child of the commissioning parents, in the same way as an adopted child, is by the making of a parental order under the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008, section 54 of 54A. A number of conditions must be satisfied before the court can make an order. Two are that the surrogate is not one of the applicants, and the second is that the gametes of at least one of the two applicants must have been used to create the embryo, which was then carried for them by the surrogate. One feature of the current law is that from the time of birth until the making of the parental order, the surrogate is regarded as the child's legal parent. She's given birth to the child, she's the legal parent, rather than the commissioning parents. The period between birth and gaining an order might be just six months, but it may well be much longer. And during that time of limbo, the commissioning parents will have full care of the child, but they will not hold parental responsibility for her, and the surrogate is unlikely to have played any role after the first few days of life. Another element of the current law is that before it can make a parental order, quote, the court must be satisfied that no money or other benefit other than expenses reasonably incurred has been given or received by either of the applicants for or in consideration of the making of the surrogacy arrangements. It is clear that would-be parents are now increasingly turning to foreign surrogacy agencies. Such agencies are typically run on a commercial basis, with the commissioning parents paying sums way in excess of any, quote, reasonably incurred expenses for the surrogate. A quick Google search last week for surrogate mother takes you immediately to advertise links for two agencies providing foreign surrogacy. One offers surrogacy at a cost ranging from at least £54,000 in Eastern Europe to at least £155,000 in the USA. The other offers, quote, a guaranteed program, unquote, available in some eight countries with a starting price of £45,000. The problem that such an arrangement presents to a court when determining a parental application is clear. The child who will have been given up at birth to the commissioning parents in the foreign country and who will have been cared for by them for many months in like manner to a child as if they've been born to the couple, will have no alternative home available to them. In terms of the child's welfare, all of the relevant factors are likely to point towards making a parental order. Yet the act requires the court to be satisfied that no money or benefit other than reasonable expenses has been given or received. Mr. Justice Hedley, a wise family judge, encapsulated this difficulty in a statement nearly 20 years ago. Quote, what the courts required to do is balance two competing and potentially irreconcilable conflicting concepts. Parliament's clearly entitled to legislate against commercial surrogacy. The difficulty is that it's almost impossible to imagine a set of circumstances in surrogacy and is clearly entitled to expect the courts to imp I think I've miscut and pasted the quote. I think I'll say. Stop here reading that quote. There's a glitch can come into it. AI, no doubt. But he was making the point that I've already made that the two are relatively irreconcilable. The approach that Mr. Justice Hedley described, which was to go on to say that you make the order because you've got no other alternative, remains the one that's pursued in court case after court case, despite an ever-widening gap between the question of reasonable remuneration and the sort of fees that I've mentioned. In most, if not all cases, it's unconscionable to contemplate removing the child from the commissioning parents, and where the surrogate also has no interest in caring for the child, it's hard to imagine the court doing other than making the parental order, despite the obvious commercial nature of these foreign arrangements. Amongst the dangers that may arise from a drive towards profit is that the welfare of the child and of the surrogate mother won't be the focus of those organizing this trade. Just as the extent of commercialization has grown, so has concern at the trafficking of women to be used as surrogate mothers. Whilst the USA has for some time been the principal country for foreign surrogacy arrangements for us in England and Wales, resulting in parental wars, Georgia and Ukraine have been the second and third. But recent data released by Kafkas shows that Nigeria is now in the second place. So in that context, and in contrast, it's to be noted that since 2021, the UK government has prohibited any child being brought into this jurisdiction from Nigeria for adoption in the absence of exceptional circumstances, but no such restriction applies for surrogacy. Last year I heard a case which, whilst it ended in an adoption order, generated a high level of concern about foreign surrogacy arrangements. The applicants were two women in their late 60s who were in a long-standing relationship, and they commissioned the birth of, quote, twins, unquote, through an agency which turned out to be based in northern Cyprus. They paid the surrogacy agency around £120,000. Embryos were created from the gametes of a male and a female anonymous donor, and they were placed into two Ukrainian women who acted as the two surrogate mothers. Towards the end of the pregnancy, the agency contrived for the twins in inverted commas to be born on the same day by directing that each of these two women should undergo a cesarean section on that day. The babies were handed over that day to the commissioning parents in northern Cyprus. As these children were not genetically related to either woman, and indeed were stateless, there were substantial difficulties in achieving their entry into the UK. And for the first four years of the children's life, they were all confined to northern Cyprus. Eventually leave to enter the UK was granted, and the family settled in England, and an adoption application was made. It had to be an adoption application because neither woman was genetically related to the child, and so a parental order wasn't available. On the basis that the children were being very well cared for, and they were, and that there was no alternative place for them to go, I made the adoption orders, but in doing so I expressed grave concern over what had transpired. The two applicants had explained to the CAFCAS officer that they hadn't given any consideration to the impact on the children of having parents who were so much older. Yet when these children are in their early teens, their mothers will be in their late 70s or early eighties. Counsel instructed in the case on behalf of the Home Office, the Department for Health and Social Care, and the Department for Education expressed a significant degree of legal and public policy concern felt in government by these events. They stressed the risk of UK citizens travelling abroad for surrogacy, who may be at risk of being involved in arrangements that use exploitation and or may be exploited themselves. The government's warning, which is replicated in official gardens, is obviously well placed. It seems clear that the two Ukrainian women were simply used to farm the two bespoke children. The two commissioning mothers were seemingly duped into an arrangement that then caused them extreme difficulties, emotional stress, and expense for a period of some four years. And the two children will have to cope with any adverse consequences of this arrangement as their young lives unfold. The case before me wasn't a one-off. It was an example of a growing number of such cases. And I've spent some time highlighting the facts this evening because, to my eyes, they starkly demonstrate the degree to which our courts are being obliged to accept commercial foreign surrogacy arrangements despite such arrangements being unlawful domestically. The Law Commission reported on surrogacy in 2023, but the focus of the report was firmly limited to domestic surrogacy and didn't address the problem that I've described. Indeed, it by recommending a clearer, more detailed breakdown of just what payments are permitted to a surrogate and what are not. The problem of what the court is to do when those prohibitions are breached is simply perpetuated, indeed, more made more clear. The report of the Law Commission at paragraph 5.30 says this. However, we recommend that the court continues to have the ability to authorise payments which are not permitted, so that it can make a parental order. If the court didn't have this power, it would be blocked from making a decision that may be in the best interests of the child, unquote. Well, if that's the case, and the court's expected to make an order on welfare grounds, even when there have been clear breaches of the provisions prohibiting certain payments, may one one may very well question the purpose of the prohibition in the first place. The message in paragraph 5.30 is surely a very green light for the trade in commercial foreign surrogacy to continue with the expectation that the English court will sweep up and make a parental order at the end of the day. There is, I suggest, an obvious disconnect between a law which prohibits domestic commercial surrogacy, prohibits any payments any other than reasonable expenses, yet accepts that if a child has been born through a foreign commercial surrogacy arrangement where the baby has been plainly bought for a commercial price, the English court will nevertheless make a parental order. If surrogacy is to be looked at again by Parliament, and I hope that it is, because the Law Commission's recommendations about improving our domestic law are welcome, then I very much hope that in doing so our legislators will call out the commercial elephant in the room and address the issue that I've described and do so in clear terms. Well, you've been a very good, quiet audience. I hope the canter round the course that I've offered, uh looking at possible future developments in family law has been of some interest. In all my time as a family lawyer, the substance of the law and practice has been continually changing. That's part of the interest in being a family lawyer. It's never been still enough to have its photograph taken. And I'm confident that the future will be no different. I'm also confident that the future will be digital through the OPRC, and with AI being ever prominent in cases before the courts. But that, as they say, is a topic for another occasion. Thank you.