News: London boroughs take ‘assembly line’ approach to care proceedings
Three major London boroughs have cut the amount of time required for care proceedings to go through the family court system by up to fifty per cent through the introduction of an assembly line process developed by car manufacturer Toyota.
In a pilot scheme launched six months ago, the boroughs of Hammersmith, Westminster and Kensington began to use a “lean production” time management system developed for automobile manufacturing.
Andrew Christie is director of children’s services for the three boroughs. He told Radio 4’s Today programme: “If you want to build a car well and have it run reliably and therefore satisfy the people who want to buy it you need to make sure that you bring together all constituent components that you need and [make sure that] you bring [them] together at the right time, in the right place and absolutely crucially of the right quality. This was a principle that we thought we ought to apply to the problem that we have…which is the unacceptable delay that children are experiencing in care proceedings.”
He added:
“We brought together all the key players: judges, social workers, court advisory officers, people who do the scheduling in court. We brought them together and asked them to talk about what their experience was.”
Nationally the average time taken time to care proceedings to proceed through the family court system is 49 weeks, or more than ten months.
Photo of Hammersmith Bridge by Axel Drainville under a Creative Commons licence
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1 Comment
That Guy on November 1, 2012 at 11:27 am
One reason why a care case can take a long time to be dealt with is because the professionals, medics and social workers etc, launch the case on the basis of not very convincing evidence. The more convincing the evidence the quicker a case can be dealt with. Is the child LIKELY to suffer SIGNIFICANT harm if left with the parent(s)?