Posts
M (A Child): Live streaming from the Court of Appeal on Thursday 4th March – Should a journalist be able to see the court documents behind a flawed decision that a child needed adoption?
This is a short blog to introduce the people and issues, and explain the lead up, ahead of the live-streamed appeal in M (A Child) tomorrow. It aims to give non lawyers a bit of orientation and some links when tuning in to the court of appeal proceedings. The listing...
Transparency Review : Oral Evidence Sessions Underway
As reported last month, oral evidence sessions are now underway as part of the President of the Family Division's Transparency Review. See our earlier post here : http://www.transparencyproject.org.uk/family-court-transparency-review-an-update/ Transparency Project...
Proposal to the Law Commission for Transparency Reform
This is the text of a proposal submitted to the Law Commission in February 2021, by The Right Honourable Sir James Munby (President of the Family Division of the High Court from 2013-2018), His Honour Clifford Bellamy (Retired Family Circuit Judge, Patron of The...
The PPE procurement case: transparency missed in both politics and law
Last week the High Court made a widely publicised decision declaring that a government minister and his department had acted unlawfully in relation to the award of PPE procurement contracts in the early weeks of the pandemic. The case is called R (Good Law Project and...
Rules are made to be broken…into chunks
This month the powers that be have decided to move the Family Procedure Rules (FPRs) from their longstanding home at justice.gov.uk to the giant gov.uk website. Whilst the justice pages were not perfect they were easy enough to locate from the justice home page and...
Privatisation of children’s services is bad for children and bad for taxpayers
This is a guest post by Martin Barrow, journalist and local authority foster carer. Martin tweets as @MartinBarrow When the Care Review was formally announced in January, one of the first actions of its chair, Josh MacAlister, was to ask the Competition and...
![Local Authority and Children’s Guardian fail in appeal against judge’s refusal to support a plan of adoption for children aged 2 and 3: T and R (Refusal of Placement Order) [2021] EWCA Civ 71](https://transparencyproject.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Screen-Shot-2019-10-04-at-10.06.58-1080x675.png)
Local Authority and Children’s Guardian fail in appeal against judge’s refusal to support a plan of adoption for children aged 2 and 3: T and R (Refusal of Placement Order) [2021] EWCA Civ 71
This is a post by Sophie Smith-Holland. Sophie is a family law barrister at St John's Chambers, Bristol. She tweets as @SSmithHolland. T & R involved an appeal against a decision to refuse to approve a plan of adoption in respect of two children, T (a 3...
Family Court Transparency Review – An Update
Things have been quiet on this front since evidence was submitted in the spring of 2020. The week before last we became aware that the President and his panel were finally starting the oral evidence sessions, but they were due to start the very next day and they were...
PD12J & Scott Schedules – Rearranging a Spider’s web
This is a guest post from solicitor Jeremy Ford. Jeremy is a partner, mediator and children’s arbitrator at Cambridge Family Law Practice LLP. He tweets as @headofroy. It was originally published on LinkedIn. Sir Andrew McFarlane, the president of the family division,...
The Court of Appeal considers Domestic Abuse – Part 3
This is part 3 of a series of posts about the four conjoined appeals. You can read part 1 here and part 2 here. This post tackles the wider issues of principle that were considered in the course of the appeals, and at the end will provide some materials for further...