Posts
Setting aside a financial remedy consent order in Covid pandemic times: HW & WW(2021) EWFC B20
This is post by Elizabeth Wark. Elizabeth is a barrister at Three Doctor Johnson's Buildings specialising in civil and family law. She tweets as @ElizabethWark7 The Covid pandemic has profoundly affected lives and livelihoods. This blog explains a family court...
The Future of Legal Aid or the Future of Family Law?
This is a guest post by Dr Jess Mant, Lecturer in Law at Cardiff University School of Law and Politics. Jess has been researching the impact of LASPO on domestic abuse cases in family courts for the last ten years. Her evidence to this recent parliamentary inquiry can...
Family arbitration : It’s arbitration, but not as we know it.
This is a guest post from Rhys Taylor, The 36 Group. Barrister, Arbitrator, Mediator. Rhys tweets as @RhysTaylor32 and is co-editor of www.familyarbitrator.com. A plea to stay with me I will admit that if I were not a family lawyer, I probably would not be bothered...
Minister for Justice thanks The Transparency Project
Recently, we noticed there had been a Parliamentary Question about family courts on 7 June, from Robert Halfon MP, as follows: To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what steps his Department is taking to improve transparency in the Family Court process....
If you don’t like the rules, change ’em
In 2017 we asked the Family Procedure Rule Committee to consider temporarily amending the Family Procedure Rules by way of a temporary pilot scheme to test out allowing 'legal bloggers' into family court hearings, alongside journalists (they have been allowed to...
Dispatches – a round up
There is a lot of twitter comment about last week's Dispatches programme (for those who didn't catch the show it can be viewed here). We have published two posts from members of TP setting out their personal views (here and here), but we thought we'd try and gather up...
Dispatches – why all the commotion is a good thing
I am the chair of The Transparency Project. This post represents my personal view about the Dispatches programme. It is not offered as a view from The Transparency Project as an organisation. It is based on my experience over two decades as a barrister representing...
Child protection investigations – no further action necessary?
The author of this post is a child protection social worker, who writes under a pseudonym, including in the Guardian. He previously wrote this post for TP. Are hundreds of thousands of families being put through unnecessary investigations by unchecked social...
Why I am OK with Dispatches
Channel 4 broadcast an episode of its Dispatches documentary series on Tuesday, called Torn Apart: Family Courts Uncovered, presented by Louise Tickle, above. Responses to it have varied widely. Here's mine. True, it featured a young man affected and lots of...
When does ‘Deprivation’ become Depravation?
At the beginning of this year, I wrote a short post which tried to explain the increasingly troublesome area of Deprivation of Liberty in an accessible way. It is, in effect, the power of the High Court under its ancient powers of protection to authorise that a child...