Parliament said the system is harmful. The system continues. Those two facts, placed alongside each other, are the accountability gap.

In 2025, the UK Parliament's Public Accounts Committee reached a formal conclusion about the family courts. This is not an opinion or a campaign statement. It is the recorded view of a parliamentary committee scrutinising one of the state's own systems.

The conclusion was stark: families are going through harmful processes.

This finding carried particular weight. The Committee's Chair was Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown — the local MP for both Kate and her son Gabriel in 2019, the year a family court judge determined that Kate was an emotionally unfit parent without any formal clinical assessment by a qualified psychologist or psychiatrist.

Kate herself submitted evidence to this inquiry. The Committee accepted that evidence as part of its investigation.

The evidence before the Committee was extensive. In 2024, the Children and Families Truth Commission published a report based on submissions from over 600 families who had experienced the family court system. Titled Eroding the Right to Family Life, it documented consistent systemic failures: children's voices being dismissed or selectively quoted, domestic abuse being mislabelled as parental alienation, protective parents being penalised for advocating for their children's safety, and an institutional culture that often prioritised process over the welfare of the child.

The Public Accounts Committee accepted this body of evidence. Its conclusion named the harm as structural, embedded in the architecture of the system itself, not merely the result of isolated bad decisions.

This was not the first warning. The 2020 Ministry of Justice Harm Report, the 2023 Domestic Abuse Commissioner's report, and the 2023 UN Special Rapporteur's findings all highlighted similar patterns: minimisation of domestic abuse, misuse of contested psychological concepts such as parental alienation, inadequate risk assessment, and the muting or selective interpretation of children's voices.

When a parliamentary committee, chaired by the former MP for both mother and child, in the year their separation was judicially imposed, accepts evidence from the affected mother and concludes that the family court system is causing harm to families, that finding is not incidental. It is specific. It is named. It is on the parliamentary record.

The institutions responsible for operating these processes have not been held accountable. The individuals who made the decisions that produced the harm have not faced consequences. The families who provided the evidence, including Kate, continue to live with the outcomes of a system the state itself has now formally described as harmful.

Parliament said the system is harmful. The system continues. Those two facts, placed alongside each other, are the accountability gap this letter is about.

Reference:

https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/49464/documents/263337/default/