Editorial

In the editorial for the last issue, we were able to acknowledge Queen Elizabeth II’s 70^th Jubilee celebrations and her lifetime of service to the country. However, in the time between the publication of the last issue and the writing of the editorial for this issue, we were to find out that one of the world’s longest serving monarchs had died. Queen Elizabeth II’s life was dedicated to the service of her country and to the Commonwealth. The editorial team would like to express their sincere condolences on Her Majesty’s passing.

With the ending of the second Elizabethan age, we move into a period of economic uncertainty and political turmoil. Rising mortgage payments due to increased interest rates, prohibitive gas and electricity prices, high-levels of inflation, ongoing or threatened strike action across a range of sectors, and news reports suggesting the possibility of staggered power ‘blackouts’ over the winter months due to shortages in the gas supply (Nanji 2022). At the time of writing (October 2022), the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister, Liz Truss, has just resigned after enduring a bruising economic and political response to her first ‘fiscal event’ as well as a tumultuous party conference in Birmingham. (Gye 2022) The Conservative Party has lost further ground in the polls (Savage 2022) and it seems that the public and the financial markets displayed little appetite for the ‘trickle-down economics’ displayed in the ‘mini-budget’ with the Bank of England having to intervene to protect the markets (Gye 2022) and the Government eventually deciding to make a policy U-turn in relation to the proposed abolition of the top-rate of income tax for the highest taxpayers after days of financial turmoil and negative press headlines. Added to these major economic concerns, the possibility of real-term cuts to the welfare budget appears to remain as a policy option on the table given the scale of the national debt.

Welfare is a central concern of the Journal and one that we aim to discuss through a range of contributions in every issue. Over the past decade, issues such as the consequences of austerity and the pandemic have all had their place within the Journal’s articles section. In this issue, we turn first to the matter of welfare payments and deductions. In their article on Universal Credit, Rita Griffiths and Ruth Cain examine the experiences of couples who have joint liability for repaying debts that one or both the partners may have accrued. Through the use of empirical data, they explore the effects of deductions made to Universal Credit for the recovery of debt and argue that for couples whose debts are aggregated, it can have the potential to affect the individual partners in disproportionate and unequal ways, particularly on the basis of gender.

Our next two articles consider access to justice issues. The first takes a domestic perspective, with Linda Mulcahy and Anna Tsalapatanis examining the issue of video hearings and the circumstances in which a case should be excluded from the list of online proceedings due to the multiple ways in which digital disadvantage manifests itself. The second is an international contribution from Bridgette Toy-Cronin at the University of Otago in New Zealand. In her article about telephone hearings for litigants in person facing housing eviction, Toy-Cronin considers whether an effective hearing can be delivered by telephone only, examining the benefits and problems for tenants in the New Zealand housing court. She argues that telephone hearings do offer the potential for greater access to justice, particularly with regards to giving them a voice, although she cautions that telephone hearings will not work in all hearings.

The final two articles in our general section consider domestic abuse. The first of these, by Rachel McPherson, provides a Scottish perspective. She examines the unintended consequences of the increased use of non-harassment orders in criminal proceedings, focusing on how they co-exist within the existing framework for child-contact decision-making. The focus on children in a domestic abuse context continues in our final article. Here, Nicola Gabrielle Ho uses a comparative approach to consider how the child should be conceptualised in laws regulating childhood exposure to domestic abuse. She argues that conceptualising the child as a direct victim of domestic abuse provides a powerful message about the severity of harm that children suffer when they experience abuse.

As always, we are grateful to our cases team and the contributing authors for a fascinating collection of case comments which cover a range of family and social welfare issues. In this issue we examine a variety of family law topics: surrogacy breakdown in the ECtHR case of H v UK (No32185/20, 31 May 2022); the standards for decision-making and proportionality in care proceedings in the Supreme Court decision of Re H-W [2022] UKSC 17; fraudulent non-disclosure in a financial remedies case; and the issue of transparency in the Financial Remedies Court. The final case comment provides an analysis of the Court of Appeal’s decision in R (BG and KG) v Suffolk County Council [2022] EWCA Civ 1047 which considered whether the Care Act 2014 empowered a local authority to pay for holidays and other recreational activities for individuals in need of care and support and where there is an eligible need.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).