Sir, I share Camilla Cavendish’s concerns over the lack of independence in experts giving evidence in the family courts and the injustice that arises when parents are prevented from automatically calling their own expert (“This blind faith in experts fails family justice”, Jan 9).

We advise and support hundreds of cases each year where parents and carers are faced with their children being wrongly removed from their families and we are no longer surprised by the same old names appearing as experts. This reliance on just one expert is dangerous when the basis of their opinions can range from pure discrimination to unqualified guesswork when venturing outside their areas of expertise. We recently advised on a case where the single expert was a child psychotherapist, who was not medically qualified, but went on to diagnose the complex autistic disorder in an adult after just a two-hour assessment. Unbelievably, the expert went on to opine that the child might suffer neglect in the future because the mother, who is on a low income, is a member of the congregation of an evangelical church that encourages tithing.

For true justice to prevail, the time is long overdue for the family courts to depend no longer on a single expert who relies on future work from local authorities wanting to remove children from their parents.

Trevor Jones

National Co-ordinator

Parents Against INjustice (PAIN)

Sir, Camilla Cavendish is wrong to condemn the use of expert witnesses in the family justice system. Experts are an essential part of many cases, both in the family justice system and in other areas of law. This is because judges are experts in the law, but not in other disciplines. The same applies to juries. Without expert evidence, the courts would lack a proper understanding of critical information.

None of this means that experts have free rein to express opinions that are influenced by who is paying their fees or any other irrelevant consideration. Experts must be objective and that tendering evidence that promotes a particular case, and so is not objective, is an abuse of the expert’s proper function and privilege: it makes it an argument, as opposed to an opinion.

It does not, of course, mean that all experts match the high standards that are imposed on them, but it is absurd to suggest that judges are not alive to the dangers or that they allow experts to run the case. Judges judge; experts don’t.

Jeremy Posnansky, qc

London WC2

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