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Sources have recently indicated that the Canadian government is considering reforming its divorce act to ensure that parents are afforded joint custody of their children following a divorce, news which has led Quickie Divorce to ask: should the UK also consider such changes? This suggestion is, unfortunately, highly impractical. Joint custody arrangements are fraught with difficulty and become all the more problematic when children are young. Nevertheless, we here at Quickie Divorce can’t help but think that a few changes to the way in which custody arrangements are formulated during divorce proceedings. Experts frequently advocate the positive effects that frequent contact with both parents can have on children of divorce, yet complaints concerning the conduct of family courts’ and their tendency to oversimplify matters – often to the detriment of fathers – remain rife. The recent behaviour of Prime Minister David Cameron has served to further exacerbate such individual’s grievances. Not only has he reneged on promises to reform family law policies, but an article he recently wrote lambasting absent fathers could quite easily be seen as vitriolic and failed to consider the many and potentially complex reasons why a father may be denied access to his children. Research, commissioned by the Ministry of Justice and undertaken by the Oxford University Centre for Family Law and Policy, allegedly indicated that there was no evidence to suggest that the courts were biased against fathers This report failed, however, to consider potential bias on the part of family reporters or expert witnesses despite the fact that these individual’s submissions will significantly influence a judge’s decision. Nor, for that matter, did it address the fact that contact orders issued by the court are not monitored or the relative ease with which they can be ignored as a result. We at Quickie Divorce frequently hear from parents that are being denied access to their children through our sister company Custody Online. Whilst there is a general assumption that such individuals are denied access with good reason, our experiences suggest otherwise. In the majority of cases the non-resident parent is being denied contact by an embittered former partner. On other occasions, former partners threaten to prevent contact in order to obtain additional child support or because the non-resident parent wants to introduce their children to their new partner; matters that require discussion, certainly, but in no way valid reasons to deny a parent access to their children. In short, current legislation concerning family law within the UK is clearly flawed. Granting both parties joint custody immediately following a divorce is unlikely to be the answer, but with it being all too apparent that agreements concerning contact with children are in need of alteration, ensuring that clearly defined and enforceable agreements are in place following a divorce having been concluded would go a long way towards ensuring that children enjoy adequate contact with both parents and vice versa.