Posts
Transparency in CoP and Family Courts – the President’s view.
On January 23rd 2017, the President of the Family Division and the Court of Protection, Sir James Munby, visited the Bristol Civil Justice Centre to have general discussion with local professionals about recent developments for the Court of Protection. There is...
Wife leads – and loses – fight to keep divorce hearings secret
The Times reported earlier this week that a case was about to be heard in which the Court of Appeal was being asked to consider the question of privacy in respect of financial remedy cases and appeals - and that it was thought that the Appeal Judges might issue some...
Family Court Reporting Watch: Weekly Round Up
Correcting, clarifying or commenting on media reports of family court cases Explaining or commenting on published Judgments of family court cases Highlighting other transparency news MEDIA REPORTS OF FAMILY COURTS CASES / FAMILY JUSTICE ISSUES ...
If the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) really have found the social workers who lied on oath in ‘the Hampshire case’, NOT to have committed professional misconduct, should they publish this decision?
Note in box added 18.1.17 We have since learnt that the Professional Standards Authority automatically reviews all serious decisions by the HCPC on fitness to practice. The issue for the Transparency Project is not the decision itself but the lack of transparency...
What does open justice actually mean?
The notion that justice must be seen to be done needs little introduction to either a lay or legal audience, but its familiarity belies an underlying complexity. See, for example, PNM v Times Newspapers, to be heard by the Supreme Court this week. The court will...
Family Court Reporting Watch: Weekly Round Up
Correcting, clarifying or commenting on media reports of family court cases Explaining or commenting on published Judgments of family court cases Highlighting other transparency news MEDIA REPORTS OF FAMILY COURTS CASES / FAMILY JUSTICE ISSUES Media reports we...
CPConf 2017: Where are we now?
EDIT 8th MAY 2017 - Conference postponed Sadly we are going to have to postpone until the autumn as we are being overtaken by events, General Elections and other distractions. However, the silver lining to this cloud is that we hope to re-emerge in the autumn,...
Judge rejects Welsh local authority’s care plan and allows mother to keep her eighth baby
The judgment of His Honour Judge Gareth Jones in Re A (A Child) [2016] EWFC B101 (25 August 2016) was recently published on BAILII. Although it is not an authority from a higher court we think it is a good illustration of some important principles, and also contains...
Bradford Council’s claim that it has decided to cut foster care allowances to the government national minimum level to comply with the law rather than principally to reduce costs
Saturday’s local Telegraph and Argus report, (‘Union hits out at Council plans to cut foster carers allowances’) of Bradford City Council's plan to reduce the core child element of their foster care allowances to the government minimum level, triggered twitter...
Women’s Aid answer our queries about their evidence base
We have been in dialogue with Women's Aid about assertions made by them that family courts frequently breach PD12J (practice direction in the Family Courts concerning domestic abuse) by allowing victims to be cross examined by their abusers. We wanted to understand...