Ms Karen Kiernan:

I thank members for their questions and for the kind comments about our founders, which they would really appreciate - they are all still alive and well.

I will respond by theme. There were some good questions about the financial impact and poverty. Certainly nobody comes out of a separation or divorce better off; there are always more costs. The process can be costly and people are obviously trying to move into and create two homes for their children. As was correctly pointed out, this cannot always happen owing to a lack of money and a lack of places for people to live. We are well aware of many parents who are separated but who need to live in the same house, which causes massive stress for them and their children. As a result of how things have been in recent years from an economic point of view, people have found it very difficult to move out. They may be caught in negative equity. Equally, now there is nowhere to move to. It causes significant pressure on families.

If a father leaves the home, he may not be able to afford a place where his children can stay in order to maintain that kind of high-quality relationship. Occasionally, there are issues with the Department of Social Protection not quite understanding shared parenting and the impact it might have on social welfare. We are trying to engage with the Department on some of those issues. Someone may not get support to have a home big enough for their children because their children may not live with them all the time. As a society, we need to understand what shared parenting is and whether it is something we want to value. There could be a need for policy and legal changes as a result of that. It causes practical difficulties.

The vast majority of families going into homelessness are one-parent families. This could be because someone is leaving an abusive situation or because the relationship has ended - or the person may always have been on their own. If only one income is coming into a home, it is really difficult, in light of accommodation and child-care costs, to manage. One-parent families are always poorer than two-parent families, which have someone else to help with child care or with an income. Statistically, one-parent families are the poorest. The vast majority of poor children are from one-parent families. Child poverty rates have increased massively in recent years. I sit on the advisory council for Better Outcomes, Brighter Futures, the national children and young people strategy. It has a target to lift 97,000 children out of poverty. We have had to increase that figure. There is a plan in place in the Department of Social Protection - it is a whole-of-Government approach - to tackle child poverty, which would be very welcome.

The budget 2012 cuts to the one-parent family payment were horrendous. The subsequent years were extraordinarily difficult for people parenting on their own who relied on social welfare. Many of the things introduced had to be reversed because they were not going to work. People ended up leaving jobs, which was counterproductive. While some of the things have been reversed, not enough has been done and, in the intervening period, more children have become poor. It was very disappointing and difficult for people and there are those who are still trying to deal with that. We saw a massive impact all the time.

I will ask Ms Kelly to respond on a couple of points. Deputy Jan O'Sullivan had a query on mediation. The family mediation service is statutorily funded, but there is a significant waiting list. To avoid that, people can pay privately, but if they cannot afford to do that, they are waiting. Sometimes quick intervention is required and that is an issue. The Deputy also had a question about the overall costing for all services. That is beyond me because it depends on how big one wants to go.

The CAFCASS system in the UK has been greatly cut in recent years; it was a better and more robust system. It is no longer world-class as it may have been in the past. However, it means where there are family law cases, there is often a CAFCASS officer in the court. If there is a need for an assessment of some kind, if concern is expressed over someone's ability to parent and have contact or access visits, or if there is concern over child safety or welfare, it can intervene and carry out risk assessments and parenting assessments and provide information relating to these to the court.

The child-contact centres are run separately from CAFCASS but there is a working relationship between them. The courts in the UK have the parenting information programme, PIP, which is a very short programme. We believe it is too short to be valuable. I am not sure who provides the programme. It could be done directly by CAFCASS or more likely contracted out to NGOs. The child-contact centres cost just over £200,000 per centre per year to run. They do all the assessments necessary and provide all the contact necessary.

A brief report is available online and I have a copy here. It gives information about how many families could be dealt with throughout the year. Not everybody needs the level of a child-contact centre; it is really for the highest-conflict families and not for people who just need some support - we were not getting many of those families. Judges were using those centres very well for the very intractable cases in order to progress them and keep people out of court.

I ask Ms Kelly to deal with the question about homelessness and children accessing their parents. There was another question about the family resource centres, particularly that in Togher.