The reality unfortunately is different for a few real life reasons. To understand this reality MPs will need to listen more closely to the victims of domestic abuse, clinical negligence or unfair dismissal in employment who have to go and face the perpetrator of the wrongdoing across a court room. There are limits to the role of mediators and the work that they can solutions they can solve.

This year the Legal Aid Practitioners Group (LAPG) have provided testament to MPs of women who have been in physically abusive relationships for ten or fifteen years. It is legal aid that get these women out of these situations not mediation.

Probably correct, but the examples you give are hardly the entirety of civil disputes are they? Nor does mediation preclude progress to the court room. If it can help (reduce costs and confrontation) then why not support it with provisos?

Incidentally, on the one occasion where I had to deal with unfair dismissal (my own – I tend to prefer not to work on days off when I have other plans, which surprised my ex-boss for some reason) it was easily dealt with by mediation. Perhaps more complex cases would not be, but I suspect that you are confusing (or the editing is confusing) those with the entirety of unfair dismissal cases.

From the perspective of private practice, the overwhelming majority of civil disputes are now settled through negotiation, mediation or arbitration before getting to court. It’s usually quicker, cheaper, and pretty much as effective.

One of the new(ish) requirements under the CPRs is that the parties should demonstrate that they have attempted to resolve the dispute under one form of ADR before launching a court case. Bad costs implications otherwise.

The problem is that two quite separate issues are being conflated. The evaluation of mediation in a family law context becomes distorted when looked at in the context of saving money.

The key point about mediation is that it has a proven record of producing better outcomes for participants than court proceedings, and is particularly beneficial for children. With this in mind, an adversarial court process should become the option of very last resort for family disputes where the need to resolve issues of communication and to provide stable and lasting settlements regarding children is key. At present it is far to easy for parties to hide behind their lawyers in a confrontational system (however it is dressed up) and thereby to avoid resolving the real issues.

The unfortunate reality is that many family lawyers (and judges) see mediation as a second class option for processing those cases that would probably have settled anyway given half a chance. It’s often not seen as a serious option for ‘difficult’ cases. Much of this attitude is due to a fundamental lack of understanding of what mediation can offer beyond a simple legalistic notion of it being an opportunity to ‘bang heads together’ to achieve an outcome. Add in the confusion caused by the costs issue and mediation also quickly becomes the ‘cheapskate’ option in the minds of many.

The reality is that if we could get to the point where mediation is the accepted norm for the resolution of family disputes (but with a properly funded legal aid system to help those where it is acknowledged – ideally by mediators and not judges or lawyers – that mediation is not appropriate in the circumstances) then we would be looking at the problem through the right end of the telescope.