Welcome to the Roundup, where we correct, clarify and comment on media reports of family law, explain and comment on published family court judgments, and highlight other transparency news.
MEDIA COVERAGE OF FAMILY LAW, TRANSPARENCY etc
The Financial Times posed the question, Prenups: is it time we changed the law? (2 Aug 2025). The problem, they said, is that in England a prenup is not legally binding, although it will be given significant weight (ie it is not conclusive and exclusive of other factors). They can be challenged in court leading to rising costs and more stress for divorcing couples. Although the Law Commission has proposed reform, it did so on the basis that ‘couples would not be able to contract out of providing for each other’s financial needs or the needs of their children’. The article ended with advice on how to make a prenup that might be enforced.
The Times (£) reported that Rape victims able to access sentencing remarks made by judges (3 Aug 2025). That in itself is nothing new, as quite a few sentencing remarks are published, but the real point of the story was twofold. ‘Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, has extended a pilot which allows victims of rape and other serious sexual offences to obtain free copies of sentencing remarks, as she extended the use of AI to civil and family cases’. The use of AI for transcription is expected to make it both cheaper and quicker, for all cases; but in the context of family courts it can also be used to translate complex court judgments into ‘simpler, age-appropriate language’. There’s also a potential for greater transparency. Sarah Sackman, the courts and legal services minister, said: ‘We are thinking about making broadly what happens in courts and such transcripts more widely available.’
The BBC reported that Courts service ‘covered up’ IT bug that caused evidence to go missing (8 Aug 2025) saying that a leaked report had revealed how HMCTS had taken several years to react to an IT bug in its case-management software that was causing evidence to go missing, be overwritten or appear lost. The software – known variously as Judicial Case Manager, MyHMCTS or CCD – is used to manage evidence and track cases before the courts. As a result of the bug, the report said, ‘judges in civil, family and tribunal courts will have made rulings on cases when evidence was incomplete’. The internal report, leaked to the BBC, also said judges and lawyers had not been informed of the bug, as HMCTS management decided it would be ‘more likely to cause more harm than good’. Sir James Munby, former President of the Family Division, was quoted as saying the situation was ‘shocking’ and ‘a scandal’.
Local Government Lawyer reported that Judge criticises police force over “unjustifiable” redactions in child proceedings case (7 Aug 2025) after Lieven J said in the case of Warwickshire County Council v BN [2025] EWHC 2080 (Fam) that ‘if the police are seeking to redact documents which are “otherwise disclosable”, they must “clearly explain the justification for those redactions”.’ (Judgment had been handed down on 14 January, but not published on Bailii until 4 August.) The public law proceedings involved intracranial and retinal haemorrhages consistent with a “shaking” injury to a very young baby, in respect of which four relevant Police Disclosure Orders had been made. But the disclosure that the police had provided was so heavily redacted that at times it was very difficult to understand. The judge had criticised the “unjustifiable redactions”, saying that the failure led to both delay and a “significant waste of public funds”.
The Sheffield Tribune had a long-form article on The ‘harmful pseudo-science’ infecting Sheffield’s family courts (9 Aug 2025) discussing the extraordinary growth in the use in child cases of allegations of ‘parental alienation’ (PA), the reliance on it of experts (including a Dr Maria Downs), and the distorting effect it has on cases according to the study by Elizabeth Dalgarno, director and founder of SHERA Research Group: Health-related experiences of family court and domestic abuse in England: A looming public health crisis (Feb 2024) That research found that investigation of domestic abuse in private family court proceedings was often diminished or ignored due to the PA allegations.
Community Care reported that Guidance issued on social worker-guardian disagreements over children’s best interests (11 Aug 2025). The guidance, issued by Cafcass and the Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS), is ‘not designed to help practitioners reach a common view, but to enable them to explain to the court why their views on the final care plan, or interim arrangements for the child, are fundamentally different’. Under the approach recommended in the guidance, ‘the two practitioners should hold a meeting, chaired by a third party, before filing their final evidence, to develop a written rationale for their disagreements that should then be submitted to the court’.
The Press Gazette reported that Secrecy order wrongly given to murdered child after no reporters attended court (12 Aug 2025), saying the absence of journalists at a pre-trial hearing had allowed a wrongful identification ban [under s 45 of the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999 ] to go unchallenged.The case involved a four year old boy who was found dead with multiple stab wounds at a property in Maidenhead, with a 37-year-old woman charged with his murder. Since the only person under 18 was the victim, who was dead, there was no justification for the anonymity order. The ban was lifted on 8 August, following a challenge by freelance journalist Charlie Moloney, allowing the case to be reported on more fully, and revealing that the accused was the boy’s mother.
The London Review of Books (LRB) had a long article, The Price of Safety: Clair Wills on the trials of Constance Marten and Mark Gordon (14 Aug 2025) detailing the history of the notorious case of the runaway parents whose newly born baby died in their care, or lack of it, and who were sensationally prosecuted and eventually convicted for gross negligence manslaughter over the course of two trials at the Old Bailey. Wills says she has been following the case for years and covers it from a social and psychological angle rather than a purely legal one. (The Family Court judgments in relation to the couple’s older children are now posted on TNA.) It’s a serious treatment of the case, but given the way the story has been sensationalised in the press, it is hard not to imagine a less serious writer turning it all into an outlaw movie, The Ballad of Connie and Gord, or something similarly tasteless. To compound their tabloid credentials, The Times (£) followed up its blanket of earlier coverage with a predictable story about how much public funds the poor little rich girl was ‘getting’: Constance Marten and Mark Gordon to receive £1m in legal aid (29 Sept 2025).
Legal Cheek reported that Magistrate removed after disclosing info that could identify alleged abuse victim (19 Aug 2025). This followed an investigation by the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office (JCIO) which issued a statement saying:
‘Magistrates sign a declaration and undertaking on appointment to be circumspect in their conduct and maintain the dignity, standing and good reputation of the magistracy at all times. A Conduct Advisory Committee carried out an investigation after it was reported that Mr Armitage had disclosed information which he obtained in his capacity as a magistrate to members of an organisation with which he was affiliated, concerning proceedings connected to that organisation. Mr Armitage’s disclosure was capable of revealing the identity of an alleged victim in a sexual abuse case, which is prohibited under section 1 of the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 1992 (the Act).’ The disciplinary panel concluded that the actions of John William David Armitage as a justice of the peace amounted to gross misconduct and recommended his removal from office, a decision that was confirmed by The Lady Chief Justice and Lord Chancellor.
The case was the subject of commentary, under the title Magistrate’s misconduct (18 Aug 2024), by Joshua Rozenberg who felt the JCIO statement did not provide enough information about the case: ‘What’s particularly shocking,’ he added, ‘is that Armitage, despite his appointment as a justice of the peace, said he was unaware that anyone claiming to have been the victim of a wide range of sexual offences is entitled to lifelong anonymity as a complainant.’ Following Rozenberg’s intervention, the JCIO updated the statement to provide more detail.
Children and Young People Now (CYP Now) reported Why growth in ‘untested’ residential family assessment centres is causing concern (20 Aug 2025) saying the ‘latest analysis by Nuffield Family Justice Observatory (NFJO) has highlighted a significant rise in the number of residential family assessment centres this decade despite a lack of evidence of their effectiveness’. This referred to a NFJO briefing paper entitled Residential family assessment centres: Data trends and questions, which collated figures on centre registrations and placements, analysed latest inspection outcomes and looked at key factors driving the rise in their use by public agencies. The paper’s authors, Dr Caitlin Shaughnessy, Dr Ellie Ott and Emma Smaleentitled, said they had embarked on the research because:
‘Residential assessment and post-birth support for families experiencing vulnerability is an understudied area with limited research on parent experiences, outcomes and effectiveness of approaches. … There is also a lack of knowledge about the providers operating in this area, the drivers behind the increase in their numbers, and assessment practices within the centres.’
The BBC reported that Domestic abuse screening tool doesn’t work, minister says (26 Aug 2025) after Jess Phillips MP, who is minister for safeguarding, said that the DASH questionnaire, the main screening tool used to decide which domestic abuse victims get urgent support since 2009, ‘doesn’t work’. The DASH (Domestic, Abuse, Stalking, Harassment and Honour-Based Violence) assessment is a list of 27 questions put to victims, to 24 of which they answer yes, no or don’t know. Phillips told the BBC’s File on 4 that she was reviewing the entire system supporting victims but said it wouldn’t ‘change overnight’. Her concerns were echoed by academics such as Dr Sarah Pemberton, Associate Professor in Criminology at Birmingham City University, who claimed that it failed to reflect the lived realities of victim-survivors from the global majority: see Expert warns DASH questionnaire only offers ‘snapshot’ of risks for domestic abuse victims.
The Express reported that BBC legend quits broadcaster after 32 years as they issue emotional statement (27 Aug 2025) with the news that senior reporter Sanchia Berg was leaving the national broadcaster at the end of August after a stellar career. We are pleased to see that their report notes her as saying ‘I’ll still be reporting Family Courts freelance & have other projects’. In a post in X Berg says she is working on a book and will continue to report as a freelancer. ‘I’m especially proud of my recent work on Family Courts. It’s changed the law – helped open up these powerful courts to all journalists – and I plan to continue with it.’
Hold The Front Page reported that Journalists overturn secrecy order on man who kicked puppy to death (1 Sep 2025), saying that media law journalist Charlie Moloney and court reporter Daniel Jae Webb of Wiltshire 999s had now succeeded in getting Wiltshire magistrates’ court to lift what they described as a ‘legally illiterate’ anonymity order prohibiting the press from publishing the name and address of a 21-year-old man who had pleaded guilty to a charge of causing unnecessary suffering to a protected animal. The defendant’s solicitor had apparently applied for the order and later defended it on the grounds that his client was vulnerable and nothing would be served by allowing his case to become ‘clickbait’. The order was lifted at a subsequent hearing after the magistrates accepted that it had been erroneously granted.
The BBC reported that Baby killed amid parents’ ‘toxic relationship’ (2 Sep 2025) saying the victim, a three-month-old baby was on a child protection plan when she was admitted to hospital in July 2024 having been violently shaken, jurors were told. She had suffered catastrophic brain injuries as well as a broken leg and ribs, and died 15 days later. The baby’s parents, from East Ham, in London, have pleaded not guilty to murder or causing or allowing her death. Their trial has yet to conclude.
Family Law Week reported that Kinship carers submit evidence on need for paid leave to government review on the parental leave system (1 Sep 2025). This related to the charity Kinship, which had announced on 20 August that it had submitted evidence to the government, in response to the Department for Business and Trade’s current Parental leave and pay review, ‘revealing how jobs and careers have been lost due to a lack of paid leave from work when they took in a relative’s child’. Alongside the charity’s own response, a group of actual kinship carers had submitted their own testimony to the government’s review, as part of a campaign for statutory paid leave for kinship carers.
The Express reported that Thousands of children and domestic abuse victims caught up in family courts chaos (12 Sep 2025) saying Westminster’s cross-party Public Accounts Committee (PAC) had found children and families were being let down. ‘The ordeal facing children and parents caught up in the nation’s creaking family courts system is laid bare in a hard-hitting new report.’ There is no link to it, but we assume the report in question is this one: Improving family court services for children (HC 883) in which the PAC said ‘Children and families are still waiting too long for family courts to resolve their cases’. It noted that in December 2024, over 4,000 children had been involved in public and private law cases open for longer than 100 weeks. The report said the government departments and agencies responsible had sought to defend ‘incremental improvements in timeliness rather than expressing any urgent need to bring the waiting times down to an acceptable level and improve outcomes overall for children and families’.
There was also a good summary of the PAC report in Local Government Lawyer: Children and families being let down by “unacceptably long delays” in justice system: PAC (12 Sep 2025), including a comment from Lisa Harker, Director of the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory (NFJO) who echoed calls in the PAC report urging the government to ‘set out a joined-up data strategy for the family justice system, working with HMCTS, Cafcass, local authorities and in consultation with the Judiciary’. She said ‘Good quality data is critical to holding the family justice system to account and ensuring that it works effectively for children and families’ but currently ‘family justice data lags behind other parts of the justice system, and well behind other parts of the public sector’.
In response to the PAC report, The Law Gazette reported, the government had announced an Action plan to cut ‘unacceptable’ family court waiting times (12 Sep 2025) and had said that the Family Justice Board, one of the agencies criticised in the PAC report, had ‘agreed system-wide targets for 2025/26 focused on increasing the proportion of public law cases resolved within the statutory 26-week timeframe and closing the longest-running cases’. The government added that the Department for Education invested £10m in 2024/25 to fund pilots focused on reducing delay through better pre-proceedings. An evaluation will conclude this financial year and £1.2m is being invested to share good practice and ‘deep dives’ on the drivers of delay.
The Times had an article saying Lawyers must educate their clients about the risks of AI (24 Sep 2025). This was about family lawyers apparently seeing ‘an emerging trend in client emails: long, artificial intelligence-generated messages that often appear polished, polite and full of legal-sounding references.’ But apart from the risks of hallucinations (AI generated fake information), most lay clients have no idea how to script the prompts to make the best use of AI tools. The result is not to save money but to sow confusion. And this is worse when the litigants don’t even have lawyers because of the lack of legal aid. The Times has another story about AI, concerning Alarm at chatbot’s legal advice to parents of special needs pupils (28 Sep 2025), saying AI chatbots offering legal advice to parents on how to get support for children with special needs are operating without professional oversight. In this case, the chatbots were evidently prepped to deal with questions about a particular subject, but were only offering generic advice in a complex area of law, which one expert said risked ‘undermining the case-by-case nature of the law’.
But there have been more positive stories about AI as well. The BBC reported that AI makes justice more transparent – researchers (20 Sep 2025) saying that ‘an artificial intelligence (AI) tool built at the University of Surrey which transcribes Supreme Court hearings makes “justice more transparent”, researchers have claimed’. The university said the system, which is tailored to the ‘unique language of British courtrooms’, reduced transcription errors by ‘up to 9% compared with leading commercial tools’. (Perhaps this means that the ‘natural language processing’ used in AI machine learning has given way to ‘legalese jargon processing’.) According to the university, the tool is already attracting interest from the UK Supreme Court and the National Archives.
BROADCAST & AUDIO COVERAGE
ITV broadcast Long Lost Family Special: The Mother and Baby Home Scandal (Sept 2025), a documentary on the scandal of the Mother and Baby Homes which were intended to deal with the ‘problem’ of unmarried mothers in England, and from the 1940s to the 1970s blighted hundreds of thousands of lives. The two episodes are currently available on ITVX.
HM Courts & Tribunals Service (HMCTS) released a podcast episode, Inside the Courtroom: Inspiring young minds through mock trials (21 Aug 2025) which explored the Magistrates’ Mock Trial Scheme, ‘a partnership between HMCTS and Young Citizens that brings authentic courtroom experiences to thousands of 12 – 14-year-olds across the UK.’ As one of the organisers explains, the scheme aims to build legal literacy and public confidence in institutions like courts Parliament. A transcript of the podcast is also available.
ITV broadcast The Hack (Sept 2025), a dramatisation of Nick Davies’s book, covering his investigation for The Guardian of the phone hacking scandal involving those working for the News of the World and others, which eventually led to the Leveson Inquiry, and a modest but ultimately not very effective shakeup of newspaper regulation. There is deeper analysis of its significance in a post on Inforrm (reposted from The Conversation) by Rodney Tiffen, Phone Hacking: New revelations of the Murdoch empire’s underbelly, from The Hack’s “real-life” journalist.
LEGAL BLOGGING
In Children left with harmful parents because of lack of foster carers (18 Aug 2025) Julie Doughty covered an Issues Resolution Hearing (IRH) listed following an earlier case management hearing (CMH) in respect of a family with six children, for whom the local authority’s final care plans were for the three younger children to be adopted, the middle child to live in long-term foster care, and the two older children (who had a different father) to live with him under a child arrangements order. Despite these plans for removal from a harmful household, the judge was told that all six children were still living at home four months after the CMH. Moreover the LA did not have foster carers available and none of the other potential carers appeared to be suitable, so the issues could not be resolved and the case had to be adjourned and thus subject to further frustrating delays.
Rather more positively, in A happy ending in Cardiff Family Court (1 Sep 2025) Julie attended a final hearing in a case she had written about in May, in which a 10-year-old child who was terrified of his mother’s violent male partner was now living with his grandparents. The happy ending was that the child could stay with them, initially under a care order sought by the local authority, to ensure the family got the support they needed, as approved kinship foster carers, but with the ultimate aim of a special guardianship order.
RECENT COMMENTARY
The Open Justice Court of Protection Project had a case comment on Hillingdon Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust v YD & Ors (Refusal of Withdrawal of Treatment) [2025] EWCOP 31 (T3) (12 August 2025). Although much of the post is about the best interests decision in the case involving someone in a permanent vegetative state, it also commented on the unusual amount of public discussion reporting of the case had generated. In the post, Jenny Kitzinger said:
‘Unlike most Court of Protection hearings, which – although open to journalists and to the general public – conclude without any public discussion of the decisions made (this includes life-sustaining treatment cases), this case has attracted quite a lot of media attention and social media comment.
Public discussion was supported by the publication of the judgment (not all judgments are published) and by reporting of it by the eminent legal commentator, Joshua Rozenberg (“Patient must be kept alive: Hospital refused permission to withdraw nutrition and hydration).
It also seems that its ‘news value’ was heightened by the use of evidence from a spiritual medium and by the opportunity, from some media, for a rather prurient focus on the fact that YD has two partners.’
The case was also the subject of commentary by the UK Human Rights Blog and the Law & Religion UK blog.
Mental Capacity Law and Policy blog had a post, Transparency in the Court of Protection – what is it good for and how long should restrictions last? (25 Sep 2025) in which Alex Ruck Keene discussed some important observations by Poole J in Re Gardner (Deceased)(Duration of Transparency Order) [2025] EWCOP 34 (T3) about the operation of the transparency framework within the Court of Protection. This was prompted in part by the fact that in this case the family of P had asked for an extension of anonymisation in the case to protect themselves beyond P’s life (which the judge rejected). The post concluded with a plea for a consistent and more comprehensive framework governing the operation of open justice and reporting restrictions in the context of the Court of Protection.
NEW JUDGMENTS OF INTEREST
Re S (Children: Transnational Marriage Abandonment) [2025] EWCA Civ 1058
This appeal concerned a family originally from Afghanistan. The father had come to the UK and married an English resident, without his family’s knowledge. He then managed to bring the children to England. By this stage, the mother had given up trying to have her children returned and was just seeking an ongoing relationship with them. Peter Jackson LJ concluded that the High Court judge’s findings about the father’s conduct hadn’t fitted the strength of the evidence, and he’s been wrong not to make findings of transnational marriage abandonment or directly alienating behaviour by the father.. The case was sent back to the High Court for welfare decisions to be made.
The Court of Appeal judgment says this about transnational marriage abandonment:
The significance of TMA in a case of child abduction is that it compounds the abduction by severing the child from the left-behind parent, which is often the perpetrator’s intention. In an appropriate case, the court should, as a matter of common justice to the left-behind parent, recognise TMA for what it is: an extreme form of domestic abuse and harm towards them and the children. [para 83]
PMC v Cwm Taf Morgannwg University Health Board [2025] EWCA Civ 1126
An appeal from a Court of Protection decision on anonymising a 13 year old child who was subject to a claim of clinical negligence has raised some important points about the courts’ powers to restrict reporting. Sir Geoffrey Vos, Master of the Rolls, said that the Court must start from the position of very substantial weight accorded to open justice. The balance starts with a very clear presumption in favour of open justice unless and until that is displaced and outweighed by a sufficiently countervailing justification. However an application for an anonymisation order in a personal injury claim by a child or protected party can be made under the inherent common law jurisdiction of the court to protect the integrity of its proceedings in the interests of justice.
Re Jake (A Child) [2025] EWHC 2230 (Fam)
Jake is a 16 year old boy who was released on licence having served a custodial sentence for convictions of sexual offences. The local authority (who had a care order) had applied to the High Court for a deprivation of liberty (DoL) order because Jake had been assessed as posing a high risk of re-offending, serious harm to others, and a risk to his own safety and wellbeing. They said he required constant supervision in a residential setting. The Cafcass Guardian didn’t think a DoL order was appropriate. The judge, Mr Recorder Jack, sitting as a High Court judge, concluded that Jake could be protected from harm by the conditions on his licence and declined to extend the short -term DoL. He said that the state body responsible for rehabilitating young offenders was the county Youth Justice Service and its Youth Offending Team. The social work team of the local authority had only a secondary responsibility and it was ‘not for the High Court sitting in its parens patriae jurisdiction to micro-manage’ the YOT’s decision making.
ER v NT (Need for fact finding hearing) [2025] EWHC 2146 (Fam)
This is a new appeal judgment from Mr Justice MacDonald on the vexed question of the necessity for a fact finding hearing in private law. The mother argued that the Family Court judge had not complied with Practice Direction 12J and had hot given adequate reasons for dismissing her application for a fact finding nor weighed up and analysed the evidence. In particular, she said the judge had over-relied on the father having attended an anger management course called ‘Angry Planet’. The mother’s barrister pointed to Cafcass guidance that an anger management course is not appropriate for a perpetrator of domestic abuse and MacDonald J was unimpressed by the evidence from the course. Overall, he decided that the judge had addressed PD12J but he allowed the appeal on the other three grounds.
Re W (A Child) (Finalisation at IRH) [2025] EWFC 266 (B)
There are a number of interesting points in this judgment by Mr Recorder O’Grady at Nottingham Family Court. The local authority was applying for care and placement orders for a six-month old child. The judge set out in detail why he considered the outstanding issues could all be resolved and final orders made at the IRH (issues resolution hearing) stage although applications had been made by the parents for further assessments and an extension to the court timetable. He evaluated all the realistic options for the child’s welfare and listed the advantages and disadvantages of fostering and adoption respectively. He was critical of the size (1200 pages) and content (much of which was irrelevant and inconsistently filed) of the court bundle which didn’t comply with current practice directions. Excessive bundles of documents are a wider problem, according to the judge.
Oxfordshire County Council v M & Ors [2025] EWFC 256 (B)
This is a thoughtful judgment by HHJ Owens at Oxford Family Court, also evaluating the options of adoption plans and long-term fostering. The four children had been together with the same foster carers for a year, and had a close relationship. The foster carers were now being considered as long-term carers. There had been various delays in getting to the stage where the local authority was applying for placement orders and the judge concluded that remaining in foster care under care orders was the best option for all the children, although two of them were quite young. Orders for contact with the parents were also made.
Re BM (Children: Tracking Devices) [2025] EWFC 290 (B)
The parents in this case had given their four children, who were in foster care, toys in which tracking devices had been sewn. The judge, HHJ Sharpe in Liverpool Family Court concluded that the only reasons for the parents doing this was to try to undermine the placement or abduct the children. Sadly, the assessments of the parents had been progressing quite well before this discovery, which the judge said had seriously damaged their prospects of establishing they could meet the children’s welfare needs. There’s more detail here on Local Government Lawyer – Parents used tracking devices in “serious effort” to remove children from foster care, Court finds
Rotherham MBC v M & Ors [2025] EWFC 298 (B)
In this unusual case to be published, revocation of a placement order was considered by HHJ Afzal in Sheffield Family Court because an adoptive placement had not been found for one of two brothers. When an adoption plan fails and a placement can’t be found, it’s usually a straightforward matter for the local authority (LA) to apply for revocation of the order and make a new plan. In this case, placement orders had been made in 2020 and one brother was placed for adoption in 2021. At the beginning of 2022, an independent reviewing officer (IRO) recommended that the placement order for the second child be revoked. For some reason, the LA didn’t apply to do this until 2023. The judge was unhappy about the LA’s application for several reasons. These included not notifying the child’s father, who still held parental responsibility, an issue about why the IRO had not brought the matter to court, and whether the child had suffered detriment to the extent he may be entitled to compensation by the LA. Positive aspects were that the child was settled in a foster placement (although he’d been troubled by the uncertainties and delays) and the brothers continued to have contact with each other.
Interestingly in this case, the LA objected to HHJ Afzal publishing, on the grounds that he had covered no novel point of law. The judge said [paras 17-18]:
… that is not the test. I do not agree that there has been no impact on C, and I find there is a wider public interest in this judgment being published.
The CG invites the Court to publish the judgment to highlight the issue. I accordingly find that this judgment should be published. No issue has been raised as to jig saw identification. There is no criteria to be met for a judgment to be published, transparency requires more judgments to be published to aid the public’s understanding of the family justice system.
The only criteria for publication is that the judge decides it’s in the public interest to publish. While there are criteria for reporting in the official law reports relating to a novel point of law or setting of a precedent, publication on TNA is not the same as a ‘law report’ and the open justice principle applies even to judgments which don’t set a precedent.
OTHER TRANSPARENCY etc NEWS
The ninth World Congress on Family Law & Children’s Rights was hosted in partnership with the Faculty of Law at Cambridge University, from 27 – 30 July 2025, with the theme of ‘Children Caught in Conflict – Inspiring Positive Change’. Over four days, 300 delegates from around the world to engage in critical discussions on advancing the rights of children, youth, women, and vulnerable families.
The parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights launched a new inquiry: Human Rights of Children in the Social Care System in England (15 July 2025) to consider the extent to which the human rights of children in England are protected in the social care system. ‘This inquiry will have a particular focus on children in care (“looked after children”), but wider aspects of the children’s social care system will be relevant, for example in regard to the availability of additional support to families with disabled children, or to the efficacy of early intervention measures, and kinship care.’ A call for evidence, and an online survey, were closed on 3 September.
HM Courts & Tribunals Service (HMCTS) issued fresh guidance on Transparency and reporting in the family courts (8 Aug 2025) which appeared to be intended as much for court staff as for parents and family members involved in family court proceedings. It explains things like Transparency Orders, who can attend and report, what can and can’t be reported and who decides, all of it written in what appears to be deliberately simple language. For example: ‘A legal blogger is a lawyer who is not involved in the case but is authorised to attend hearings just like a journalist.’ The guidance begins by outlining the back story of the current President’s Transparency Review, the Transparency Implementation Group (TIG) and the Reporting Pilot which it set up. It summarises the current position as being that: ‘Anything that is reported must be anonymised so that you and your family cannot be identified. This is to help the public understand how the courts work, while still protecting your family’s privacy.’ The guidance may only be a useful starting point, and it makes clear that litigants need to check with their lawyers or the court to know what exactly they can and can’t say to reporters or anyone else about their case.
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) announced TBIJ launches mentorship programme to support next wave of family court reporters (4 Sep 2025), saying it was ‘offering a unique opportunity to two journalists to be mentored by TBIJ’s award-winning Hannah Summers, the UK’s first full-time family court reporter’. Successful applicants for the six-month scheme will be provided with at least an hour of one-to-one mentoring per month as well as help and guidance outside of these times. ‘The aim is to instil the knowledge and confidence to cover family court cases effectively and responsibly, including seeking to lift reporting restrictions and making legal challenges’. The mentorship programme is intended to build on TBIJ’s earlier success in harnessing the greater freedom to report from the family courts introduced by the Reporting Pilot and other recent transparency developments.
Nuffield Family Justice Observatory’s ‘chart of the month’ demonstrated how 80% of cases in private family law proceedings involve at least one unrepresented party (18 Sep 2025). It said the rise had been triggered by the restriction on eligibility for legal aid following the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 and worsened by the recent cyberattack of the Legal Aid Agency. ‘This rise has had knock-on effects, increasing pressures on the family courts as more applicants become litigants in person and require greater supports to navigate proceedings, as well as on other services such as community services or children’s social care when families struggle to resolve disagreements’.
The Judiciary website updated its information on the Family Division and Family Court (on 25 September) to include a specific page covering Publication of Family judgments, basically in order to provide a clear and accessible point from which to download the Practice Guidance on Publication of Judgments issued by the President on 19 June 2024. We had previously written a post, Will my Family Court judgment be published? (19 Sep 2025) in which we had complained of the difficulty of finding this particular guidance, so we are pleased that it has now been added not only via this dedicated new page, but also to the main Transparency Implementation Group webpage.
HM Inspectorate of Prisons published a report, Children in custody 2024–25 (23 Sep 2025) analysing 12–18-year-olds’ perceptions of their experiences in secure training centres and young offender institutions. It revealed that many continue to feel unsafe, are failing to get to education and feel uncared for by staff. It said children were locked up for too long in most establishments, with many unable to take part in any productive activity during their time in custody.
The Youth Justice Board for England and Wales (YJB) responded the next day in a blog by its chief executive, Stephanie Roberts-Bibby, expressing serious concerns about the problems with custody, but also suggesting that more needed to be done towards prevention as the starting point, addressing disproportionality, reducing unnecessary remand, and embedding the evidence base across all sectors: see Responding to the Children in Custody report: how the YJB is supporting change (24 Sep 2025).
Nuffield Family Justice Observatory (NFJO) published a blog post saying Two years since the Ministry of Justice started to track Deprivation of Liberty orders, 2,606 children have been subject to applications (25 Sep 2025). It said quarterly data from April-June 2025 released by the Ministry of Justice showed that 357 children had been subject to deprivation of liberty (DoL) applications under the inherent jurisdiction of the high court, a 12% increase on the 320 DoL applications for the previous quarter (January – March, 2025) and nearly 20% higher than the 299 applications for the equivalent quarter last year (April – June, 2024). Such children often had complex needs and circumstances which included placement breakdown, mental health concerns and extrafamilial risk factors such as sexual or criminal exploitation. Yet although more children had been deprived of their liberty, there had been limited tracking of the characteristics of these children or their needs. ‘Further national data is needed to understand the DoLs population, and what their support needs may be’.
The HMCTS Update for 26 September 2025 included a link to a blog post on Media notification rules clarified for criminal courts, dated 24 July, about revised rules due to come into force on 6 October. The Criminal Procedure Rules will then ‘explicitly require proper notification of journalists when discretionary reporting restrictions (as opposed to automatic restrictions for youth cases and certain offences) are proposed, addressing a long-standing concern about transparency in criminal courts’. The change, recommended by HMCTS’s Media Working Group, appears to have been urged by The Media Lawyers Association and News Media Association, following cases in which there had been a failure to inform the media of reporting restrictions.
EVENTS
Two Family Law Week conferences:
Public Children Law: 30 September 2025, at Millennium Point, Birmingham. The theme this year is ‘Public law – where are we and where are we going’. The conference to be Chaired by HH Stephen Wildblood KC with Keeley Lengthorn as the conference host. Keynote Address: The Honourable Ms Justice Harris.
Private Children Law: 23 October 2025, at Cavendish Conference Centre, London. The theme this year is ‘Reframing Private Children Law: Voice, Choice, and Protection in a Changing Landscape’. Keynote Address: Dame Nicole Jacobs, Domestic Abuse Commissioner. Also includes a Play & follow up interactive discussion: ‘Daisy through the looking glass’ written & directed by HH Stephen Wildblood KC.
Finally…
We have a small favour to ask!
TEN YEARS A CHARITY
The Transparency Project is a registered charity in England and Wales run by volunteers who mostly also have full-time jobs. Although we’ve now been going for a decade, we’re always working to secure extra funding so that we can keep making family justice clearer for all who use the court and work in it.
We can’t do what we do without help from you!
We’d be really grateful if you were able to help us by making a small one-off (or regular!) donation through our Just Giving page.