CUTS to legal aid could result in cases in the family courts taking longer because people will be forced to represent themselves, a retired senior judge warned yesterday.

Baroness Butler-Sloss, a former head of the High Court’s Family Division, said there were a “hard core” of cases which could not be dealt with through the Government’s preferred measure of mediation.

Justice Secretary Ken Clarke last month announced plans to £350m a year from legal aid by 2014/15, including a reduction in family legal aid. At question time in the House of Lords, Justice Minister Lord McNally told peers the Government wanted to move away from litigation in settling family disputes as research had shown it “exacerbated” problems and “caused lasting harm”.

But Lady Butler-Sloss, a crossbench peer who gave James Bulger’s killers new identities when she sat as a judge, said: “As a judge who tried a large number of family cases where both sides were litigants in person, I can confirm that these cases will take much longer.”

Lord McNally replied: “I fully accept there are family disputes that can become so bitter and intractable that resolution is very difficult but that still doesn’t argue the case for the taxpayer funding both sides in that sort of dispute.”