Where it has been established (by agreement or order) that the children will spend most of their time with one parent, arrangements will then have to be made for the other parent’s contact with the children. ‘Contact ’ essentially means the same as the old term ‘access’, and can include indirect contact, such as telephone contact and contact by letter or email. There are no hard and fast rules about contact and the amount of contact depends upon many factors (see below), but typical contact for all but the youngest children might be every other weekend, one evening a week and half of all school holidays.
If contact cannot be agreed between the parents then one of them may apply to the court for a contact order. A contact order is an order requiring the person with whom a child lives, or is to live, to allow the child to visit or to stay with the person named in the order, or to allow such other contact between the child and that person (for example, telephone contact) as the court specifies. The order will define when, where and how the contact is to take place, for example that contact shall take place every Sunday from 10am to 5pm, with the father collecting the child from, and returning him to, the mother’s home. This has the benefit of certainty but of course has the drawback of inflexibility – for example, when one parent cannot keep to the arrangement due to work or other
commitments. It is very difficult to incorporate flexibility into a contact order and this is another reason why arrangements should be agreed if possible.
The contact order may also include conditions, such as that the contact take place at a specific location or under the supervision of a specific person.
On an application for a contact order, the court may do one of the following:
• Make an order setting out the contact arrangements (which may or may not be the arrangements the parties are seeking); or
• Before making a contact order, make a contact activity direction requiring a party to the proceedings to take part in an activity that promotes contact with the child concerned, for example programmes, classes and counselling or guidance sessions to assist a person ‘as regards establishing, maintaining or improving contact with a child’, or addressing a person’s violent behaviour to ‘enable or facilitate contact with a child’, or ‘sessions in which information or advice is given as regards making or operating arrangements for contact with a child, including making arrangements by means of mediation’; or
• It may (unusually) refuse to make an order if it considers that no contact is appropriate; or
• It may make no order if matters are agreed and it is considered that no order is needed.