“A week”, supposedly said former Prime Minister Harold Wilson, “is a long time in politics”.

However, in 2018, my colleague Sam Hall wrote an article on the Hall Brown ‘blog about the need to ensure that an essential part of the family justice system remained in operation (https://hallbrown.co.uk/blogs/putting-families-first/).

Only days before, Sam and I had met with Nicholas Crichton, a retired district judge who helped establish the Family Drug and Alcohol Court (FDAC).

The FDAC uses a multi-disciplinary team – comprising social workers, psychiatrists, substance misuse specialists and domestic violence experts – to help prevent the children of parents addicted to narcotics or alcohol from being taken into care.

Even so, its national co-ordinating unit found itself at risk of closure because central government had made clear that no further funding would be forthcoming.

In response, we launched a fundraising campaign because we believed that the National Unit was simply too important to lose (https://www.thetimes.com/article/75f54b50-807f-11e8-a645-f0478472c67b?shareToken=101e660f36a57f44e2d7813a9fc5c9fb).

Together with other benefactors, we were able to come up with sufficient money to keep the unit functioning until ministers stepped in with an additional package of support the following year (https://www.gov.uk/government/news/15-million-investment-to-help-keep-families-safely-together).

I am, therefore, bitterly disappointed that we find ourselves compelled to make the same arguments about FDAC’s merits as it once more faces an existential crisis due to uncertainty about whether it can afford to keep going.

It should not be like this.

Research commissioned by the Department for Education last year detailed how FDACs made sense in terms of their economic as well as familial impact.

It showed that each case dealt with by FDACs across the country saves local authorities some £58,000 in care costs and £15,000 in legal costs on average (https://fdac.org.uk/cost-benefit-analysis/).

Put even more bluntly, every £1 spent on an FDAC team saves the taxpayer £3.20.

A similar point was made in May this year by none other than the most senior family law judge in England and Wales, Sir Andrew McFarlane, the President of the Family Division of the High Court.

Speaking to the annual conference of the association of family lawyers, Resolution, he outlined how FDACs had been “the subject of more research than any other aspect of Family justice”, the results of which had been “uniformly positive” (https://www.judiciary.uk/speech-by-the-president-of-the-family-division-the-road-ahead-the-journey-so-far/).

It wasn’t the first occasion on which Sir Andrew had made his feelings on the matter known.

Two years before, he had told an event in the House of Lords that he didn’t understand why there wasn’t an FDAC team in every family court in the land.

Instead, he described how “it is left to local courts, local authorities cobbling together money” to keep it going (https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/mcfarlane-calls-for-fdac-schemes-in-every-court/5117604.article).

Sir Andrew is far from the only prominent FDAC advocate. Indeed, last November, the current Lady Chief Justice, Baroness Carr, explained how FDAC had shown “remarkable results” (https://www.judiciary.uk/speech-by-the-lady-chief-justice-to-the-fdac-annual-conference/).

The system was, she said, able to “rewrite the destinies – indeed the entire family trees – of some of the most vulnerable people in society”.

Yet, Baroness Carr added, “the elephant in the room is funding”. Although it was for “elected officers” and not judges to decide how to allocate public spending, she stressed that a shortage of cash put FDAC’s “entire project at risk.”

“To my mind”, she concluded, “that would be a tragic missed opportunity”.

Others recognise the precarious current nature of FDAC’s situation too. In recent days, the former Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer, urged government departments to “get their act together or watch a lot more families be needlessly broken up” (https://www.thetimes.com/article/838b890f-9c65-4f19-80ff-f8e39e813e56?shareToken=bb0d82370836eab0c81ebced05ea8bcc).

We at Hall Brown had hoped that our previous campaign would help provide something of a blueprint, demonstrating how vital these courts are and convincing other agencies to contribute to their long-term future.

In the continued absence of central funding, however, we have provided further financial support this year because of our absolute belief in the value which FDAC courts offer to both families and wider society.

Our hope remains, however, that these obvious benefits will be acknowledged by the government and that meaningful, long-term funding will be put in place to enable national availability to all families who need it.