In a nutshell

Education Minister Tim Loughton paid £444,000 to the Centre for Separated Families even though the charity owed £164,000 to HM Revenue & Customs.

Karen and Nick Woodall stole the Government payments from the Centre for Separated Families and abandoned it in autumn 2013.

Tim Loughton helped Karen Woodall launch Jersey Centre for Separated Families in February 2014.

On 20 December 2016 the Centre for Separated Families was dissolved, owing £178,000 to HM Revenue & Customs.

Time line

• On 25 February 2011 Conservative Education Minister, Tim Loughton, announced £60 million funding for the voluntary and community sector, including £420,000 for the Centre for Separated Families. (The eventual sum paid was £444,000.)

  
  

• On 9 June 2011 HM Revenue & Customs petitioned the Insolvency Court to wind up the Centre for Separated Families because it owed £164,000 in unpaid PAYE and National Insurance contributions.

  
  

• On 23 August 2011 the Centre for Separated Families entered a Company Voluntary Arrangement to pay £3,100 per month towards their debt to HMRC.

  
  

• In January 2013 Karen and Nick Woodall stopped paying towards their CVA.

  
  

• By autumn 2013 Karen and Nick Woodall had abandoned the Centre for Separated Families, which owed £164,000 to HM Revenue & Customs. And on 18 December 2013 it was removed from the Charity Commission as it had “ceased to exist”.

  
  

• On February 2014 Tim Loughton helped launch Karen and Nick Woodall’s new charity, Jersey Centre for Separated Families, in the Channel Islands.

  
  

• On 20 December 2016 the Centre for Separated Families was dissolved on Companies House, owing £178,000 to HM Revenue & Customs.

The full story

Following the general election on 6 May 2010, a Coalition Government was formed, with Tim Loughton as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Education beneath Michael Gove.

On 25 February 2011 Tim Loughton issued a press release announcing £60 million for the voluntary and community sector for 2011 to 2013. Around £20 million was awarded under the category of families and relationship support. Most of this money went to organisations favoured by Samantha Callan, including the Centre for Separated Families, run by Karen and Nick Woodall. But Karen and Nick Woodall were unusual in that, like Wendy Weal of Interface, who was awarded £x, they were close to Tim Loughton as well. In the case of the Woodalls, it seems likely that they bonded over their shared hatred of veteran Labour MP, and famous feminist, Harriet Harman. (In the case of Wendy Weal, there was a close relationship forged while she worked in the Department for Education.)

“I am absolutely up for the task of standing up to Harriet Harperson as being the vanguard of that ghastly regiment of feminists who have taken us so far from family values."

Tim Loughton speaking at a session on “Marriage and the family. How do we hold on to the family, in a time of fungible relationships and sexual liberation?” at the Conservative Renewal Conference on 14 September 2013. Co-speakers included anti-feminist, Kathy Gyngell, and another apparent beneficiary of Tim Loughton’s largesse with tax payers’ money, evangelical Christian, Harry Benson.

The Department for Education Grant to the Centre for Separated Families was to train early years workers in Sure Start centres and private day nurseries via the National Day Nurseries Association to support parents of under 5s who were in the process of separating or recently separated to co-parent their children. On the face of it, this sounds like a good thing. But in reality, the Woodalls were “re-educating” early years workers in their own theories of domestic violence and parental separation, which, Karen Woodall’s blogs attest, were frequently called “dangerous” by other professionals.

On 21 June 2012, half way through the two year training programme, Karen Woodall commented in a discussion below the line on her blog:

“I know that one Kat – recent training delivery from CSF to early years sector – stats on DV are shown and someone says ‘oh I would have to be challenging that’…on discussion it emerged that the consensus in the room is that male violence against women = ‘real’ domestic violence female violence against men = self defence….. we then have to take people on another journey of self awareness to get them to a place where they can shed the brainwashing of the past decades on what domestic violence actually is and who suffers it. Its a HUGE problem and because DV is common in family separation we have to tackle it.`'“

On 4 September 2012, in David Cameron’s first Cabinet reshuffle, Tim Loughton was sacked as Education Minister while Maria Miller was rewarded for her child maintenance work with a promotion to Culture Secretary, as well as, ironically, Minister for Women and Equalities. Karen Woodall later wrote:

“Faced with reality over the past year or so and seeing the light switched on blindingly when Tim Loughton and Maria Miller disappeared from the family separation landscape in 2012, I stopped digging and started thinking what could I do next that might keep me going until we had chance to do something a second time around. That’s what I mean about scanning the landscape, plotting the terrain, knowing who is moving which pawn to which bishop and why.”

By late summer 2013, with Maria Miller promoted to Minister for Women and Equalities (!) and no longer around to fight their corner, Karen and Nick Woodall’s relationship with the Department for Work and Pensions was unravelling. The couple were growing increasingly exasperated with the lackadaisical attitude of people attending their training sessions, and Karen Woodall railed on her blog about “the late arrival and early departure of the team that attended the HSSF* telephony training earlier this year and the additional lolling around and focus on going to watch the X Factor that went on throughout the day, all paid for by the state and accompanied by extreme indifference”.

To add insult to injury, the couple’s theories on domestic violence were meeting resistance at the DWP. Karen and Nick Woodall believe that most allegations of domestic violence are fabricated or exaggerated by vindictive women in order to gain the upper hand in child custody disputes. Since the beginning of the child maintenance reforms in 2011, they had argued that waiving the application fee for the statutory child maintenance system for domestic violence victims would inevitably lead to many more women making false allegations. Even in cases where violence had genuinely occurred, they argued, women were just as violent as men, and most violence was “situational” and should not be a barrier to making “family based arrangements” for child maintenance. Their domestic violence theory appears to have influenced the Centre for Social Justice report, “Beyond Violence”, co-authored by Samantha Callan and Elly Farmer in 2012, but it directly contradicted official Government guidance on “Violence Against Women and Girls” - and DPW officials were apparently becoming anxious. On 18 September 2013 The Rights of Man website reported:

“Continuing on the domestic abuse front, a Facebook message from Karen Woodall (Centre for Separated Families) stated "here's one for all of you interested in domestic violence.... Nick is training today for the DWP, he is not allowed to talk about violence against men or violence in separating couples in any way other than that which is ratified by the Coalition Government Policy on VAWAG by order of the HOME OFFICE - he also has two observers sitting in on the training to make sure he does not transgress this order (that's because they are nervous about my blog and my refusal to do as they ordered me to).   This is what your taxes pay for people...the state is most definitely controlling you and if you separate it will be Women's Aid and Refuge who rule your world."

At this point the long relationship between the Woodalls and the Department for Work and Pensions unravelled. It’s difficult to know what exactly transpired, as Karen Woodall protected two blog posts on 8 September 2013 and 11 October 2013 with passwords, presumably because they were so full of bile that even she realised they might be inappropriate.

On 30 September 2013 she wrote:

“As Autumn settles in and the leaves begin to fall, we are planting seeds for a different way of working. Seeds which have been taken from the fruit of our whole family approach with families over the past fifteen years and which have proved to us and to the parents and practitioners we work with that outside of the lone parent paradigm, where fathers as well as mothers are equally valued for the different things they offer to our children, different outcomes are possible.  Off shore on Islands around the UK, soon in Northern Ireland, the Midlands and in London, whole family approaches will be embedded within the community, bypassing the state and the illusion that it peddles, connecting with families in ways that offer astonishing levels of change.  As we roll this ball up hill again, more hands have come to join us and the model of collaboration between men and women serving the needs of mothers and fathers in local communities is becoming real.  A world far beyond the lone parent paradigm, where lies, stereotypes and misinformation are no longer needed because we are working with reality, not what the women’s rights movement tell us about families.  In a world of sadness and loss, where challenge and change are daily experiences, mutual co-operation in local communities brings relief, respect and rejuvenation to mothers and fathers who are hurting and struggling to cope.  And those of us who work with families, find that we can sleep again at night.”

On 24 October 2013 she wrote:

“Something that matters to us more than anything else, and in the months to come, throughout 2014 and beyond, we will be bringing to life our Network of Family Separation Centres, which will be linked up to our Family Separation Centre Hub and which will provide, for the very first time in this country, a joined up, whole family focused support service, through which all of our information, support and advice can be accessed… Because when family separation, is put back in the hands of families themselves and the state sponsored rights based services are bypassed, children will get the help that they need and their connection to the parents that they love so dearly, will not be systematically eroded.  And that’s when humanity will once again set in.”

On 20 December 2013, apparently having calmed down sufficiently to write about the severing of relations in a post titled “2013 - A Year in the World of Family Separation”, she wrote:

“Summer arrives and I have decided that I can no longer support the DWP in their Help and Support for Separated Families Initiative.  Inspired by a visit to Jersey and the work of some wonderful volunteers at Milli’s which is part of the Jersey Centre for Separated Families and linked in to our growing network, I write a blog contrasting that with the experience of working with managers from the Options service.  I have pretty much made up my mind by now that I can no longer work with the DWP because what they have produced is so far away from what parents need that it will cause harm rather than serve to support collaboration between parents.  The DWP don’t want me delivering the training I have written for their telephony service after this is published and I am glad to walk away from it.  What began as a vision of reform of family services, with a telephony circle of leading charities working to help parents to collaborate, ends up with a tiny handful of organisations – one of which has clearly over exaggerated the number of people delivering their telephone services, another of which is unhappy with the concept of collaboration. Two of the organisations do have an understanding of what faces fathers and their children after separation so I comfort myself with the idea that at least my efforts went to supporting those…

Autumn, and I’m heading into a massive life transition. A house move looms and we have both left the Centre for Separated Families behind.  Now we can properly focus on the work that we really want to do, which is therapeutic support to the whole family through separation and beyond.  Our plans for research are coming to fruition and we are meeting new people, our new project, the National Network of Separated Family Centres is starting to flourish.”

The two organisations which Karen Woodall approved of were presumably Wikivorce and Families Need Fathers. As I illustrate elsewhere on this site, she had close relationships with Nick and Ruth Langford, former senior Fathers 4 Justice members who ran Wikivorce, and several prominent members of Families Need Fathers like Vincent McGovern and

The Department for Work and Pensions claim that the Centre for Separated Families fulfilled the contract. But they were only paid £23,500 even though the contract stated that payment would be £25,000 to £50,000.

On x February 2014 former Education Minister Tim Loughton - the man who paid Karen and Nick Woodall £444,000 while they were insolvent - flew out to St Helier to help the couple with their formal launch of yet another of their dodgy projects.

The launch of Jersey Centre for Separated Families took place in the swanky Royal Yacht Hotel on the beach front in St Helier.

In July 2014 the Centre for Separated Families published yet another of its reports on family breakdown, this one called “Fully Committed? How a Government could reverse family breakdown”. Nick Woodall was a co-author alongside various Christian fundamentalist friends of Samantha Callan. By this time, his profile stated that he ran the Family Separation Clinic. The report cited “Island Separated Families” - see Isle of Wight Separated Families - and Jersey Centre for Separated Families as examples of good practice.

However, despite all the hype, there is little evidence of activity from Jersey Centre for Separated Families following the launch. In September 2014 the charity published a newsletter proclaiming Karen Woodall Chair. Then, nothing.

It would appear that the Woodalls may have spent around £25,000 on the charity, money which they siphoned off from the Centre for Separated Families rather than paying off their debt to HM Revenue & Customs.

Tim Loughton was fine with all this. So fine, in fact, that he continues to inappropriately interject about parental alienation periodically on his friends’ behalf.

This was the same grant under which Tim Loughton awarded £8.9 million to Kids Company - a decision for which he refused to take responsibility four years later when questioned by the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee.