How Melanie Gill became a ‘leading authority’ on parental alienation

Melanie Gill, a former music promoter and receptionist, has spent more than 15 years giving expert evidence to the family courts about a controversial pseudoscience. Her views have informed numerous life-changing decisions – including the removal of at least a dozen children from the care of their mothers. She is one of the unregulated experts that proposed new rules, revealed today by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, would restrict from giving evidence in the family courts.

Gill specialises in the assessment of parental alienation, the heavily disputed concept that a child has rejected one of their parents after being manipulated by the other. For more than a decade she has been one of the experts at the forefront of the “complete upsurge” in such allegations in family court disputes in England and Wales.

The lack of public data means it is impossible to know the full scale of Gill’s involvement with the courts, though by her own estimation she has been appointed as an expert “probably 150 to 200 times”. This is despite the fact that she is not, and never has been, registered with the appropriate regulator – though this is not currently a requirement for court experts.

Analysis by TBIJ has established that evidence provided to the courts by Gill was pivotal in the decisions to remove 11 children from six mothers, who she said had alienated them from their fathers. It is impossible to know if any of these decisions would have been different if another expert had been advising the court.

In two of the cases, the court found that the father had engaged in coercive and controlling behaviour and/or domestic abuse.

In a further case documented in a published judgment Gill, along with a psychiatrist, recommended two children were removed from their mother and placed in foster care after she identified their father as having alienated them to the point that one of the children posed a physical risk to their mother.

The judge in the case describes Gill as “undoubtedly an expert in her field” as well as “measured, straightforward, child focused and clear in her evidence”.

Promo and politics

Melanie Pringle Gill was born in 1957 in Lancashire. She attended one of the best private schools in the north-west, Merchant Taylors, which today charges fees of £17,000 a year, and later went on to study psychology at Brunel University. In 1980 she graduated with a third.

Rather than pursue a career in psychology, Gill worked in schools before becoming a music promoter. In 1985 her Brighton-based business, Endless Self Promotion, featured on the front page of Music Week. She spent the next decade, in her own words, working “extensively as an entrepreneur in the music business and television industry”.

Gill returned to psychology in 1999, completing a course in child forensic studies at Leeds University, for which she was awarded a diploma rather than a master’s degree as she did not complete her dissertation.

By this point Gill has also made her first foray into the world of politics. In 2004 she sought to become the Conservative party’s prospective parliamentary candidate for Kemptown in Brighton. As part of her campaign Gill wrote a letter to the Argus in which she insisted her striking dyed hair, which remains pink to this day, would help the Conservatives win the seat because it allowed her to cut across normal conversation barriers.

Gill was not selected to stand but nonetheless became influential in Conservative policy circles, including providing advice to Iain Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), which shaped many of the social policies adopted by the post-2010 Conservative government. She was part of the thinktank’s family working group, which produced a report titled Breakdown Britain in 2006.

Although she was not the author of the report, the chapter on family breakdown provides some clues about Gill’s worldview.

The report argued that fractured, fatherless families cost the country billions in lone-parent benefits and lead to homelessness, drug addiction and unemployment. It called for policies in support of marriage and a registered “concern” over those that “encouraged the highest possible labour market participation for mothers”.

Gill also addressed the CSJ conference during which David Cameron made his famous “hug a hoodie” speech. Afterwards, Gill wrote an article for the Daily Mail, in which she linked “feminist ideology” to the “collapse of the traditional family” and, in turn, increasing crime. She argued working mothers’ neglect of their children had helped create “bewildered and angry young people who vent their distress in violence and abuse”.

She went on to contribute to other CSJ reports, including a policy document commissioned by Cameron which recommended tax breaks for married couples and civil partners in order to support “stable family life”. The policy made it into the Conservative manifesto and was introduced in 2015. During a call with an undercover reporter working with TBIJ, Gill claimed the Mindful Policy Group, which she founded, had tried to get parental alienation included in child abuse legislation.

The CSJ denied Gill became influential as a result of her relationship with the thinktank. It said it had no knowledge of how she might have described being a working group member to others.

But behind her apparently successful new career in public life, Gill faced growing financial problems. Trading as Commonsense Associates she went bankrupt in April 2008. In total, TBIJ has established links between Gill and six dissolved companies and one liquidated business that could not keep up with its debts.

In 2023 Keighley Gill Consulting collapsed owing more than £55,000 to HMRC. Gill had set up the company in 2010 with David Keighley, a BBC journalist turned psychotherapist. The official liquidator noted Gill had taken out over £50,000 in loans from the company, which she could not afford to pay back straight away. She was still repaying the debt in July 2024.

Tim Loughton, the former Conservative MP, was a director at two of the dissolved companies. Until standing down in 2024, Loughton spent 27 years as the Conservative MP for East Worthing and Shoreham, the constituency neighbouring Gill’s home town of Hove.

Loughton was a junior education minister for children in the first two years of the Cameron government, during which time he awarded £25m in grants to family and relationship organisations. More than £400,000 of that went to the Centre for Separated Families run by psychotherapist Karen Woodall, another prominent unregulated expert who has given evidence about parental alienation in the family courts.

‘Leading authority’

It is unclear when Gill first started being instructed in family court proceedings but she claims to have been involved in up to 200 cases as a court-appointed expert, some involving local authorities. An expert is usually jointly appointed by all parties to provide an assessment and opinions on complex subjects.

In January her shocking biases were exposed in an undercover investigation by TBIJ and Tortoise Media. During a call with our undercover reporter, who was posing as a father involved in a family breakdown, Gill described the service she provides to the court as “completely unbiased” and “based on science”. She claimed to have provided training on parental alienation to family court judges in 2014 (TBIJ has been unable to verify whether this training took place). “I happen to be one of the world’s leading authorities on these cases,” she said.

Gill lectures for Parental Alienation Europe, a campaign group that claims 50 million adults in the continent are affected by parental alienation. She gives regular interviews to YouTube channels for parents rejected by children, including Parental Alienation Advocates.

But her involvement in the court has declined amid increased legal and media scrutiny of parental alienation. In December the Family Justice Council, which advises the government and the judiciary, issued new guidance describing the idea of “parental alienation syndrome” as a “harmful pseudoscience”.

While the guidance acknowledged that the harm of alienating behaviours to a child can be “significant and enduring” it stated that psychologists cannot “diagnose” parental alienation and that any allegations of domestic abuse – which might be driving a child’s rejection of their parent – should be considered first.

Gill’s credentials were also directly challenged in a landmark appeal overseen by Sir Andrew McFarlane, the president of the Family Division, on the role of unregulated experts in the family courts in 2023.

While the high court decided courts were free to appoint unregulated psychologists like Gill, it said registration with the regulator, the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC), was the “kitemark” for resolving questions over their qualifications.

Gill is not registered with the HCPC, which in 2022 asked her to remove a reference to “child forensic psychology” from her CV as it was potentially misleading. (Forensic psychologist is a protected title. Forensic psychologists, who work in criminal and family courts, need to have completed an approved master’s course – which Gill had not – and are regulated by the HCPC.)

The high court judgment made clear it should not be read as an “open house” for unregulated experts and courts need to be cautious when instructing them in the future. Despite this, Gill, has said she was “exonerated” by the appeal. During her call with our undercover reporter, she described McFarlane as “weak” and “soppy as hell”.

(In another published judgment from 2019 Gill is described as “Dr Gill” and in another from 2018 she is described as a “clinical psychologist” despite holding neither title. It’s unclear how the inaccuracies made their way into the judgments.)

It is unknown how many times she has been instructed by the family courts since the 2023 appeal but, in one case reported by TBIJ in April last year, the high court judge, Mrs Justice Judd, made clear she did not adopt Gill’s recommendations, noting the psychologist’s assessment was not based on the “evidence as a whole”.

Gill, who had told the court the mother in the case had unconsciously turned her two children against their father, was cross-examined during the proceedings in Bristol and told Judd: “I have been challenged and questioned on my qualifications in every single private law case I have ever undertaken and I have never been criticised.”

Gill’s representative told TBIJ at the time that she was well-qualified to perform the role of expert witness and had years of specialist training.

Conversations with prospective clients make it clear who Gill blames for her current lack of work. “There are brave judges trying to instruct me,” she told our reporter, “but the minute someone realises it’s me, they go out and they grab all the nasty people – the feminists, the journalists. And they start [going] on and on and on.”

In a statement provided after being told of the undercover calls, Gill said: “The narrative and questioning continue to show a significant gap in your understanding of regulation and evidenced based assessment on these specific cases, and the very complex nature of the family dynamics involved and particularly the effects on children.”

A Ministry of Justice spokesperson told TBIJ: “We share the concerns about these unregulated ‘parental alienation’ experts and we are working with the Family Procedure Rule Committee to prevent them from giving evidence in the family courts.”

Proposed new rules have now gone out to public consultation.