Blog
Re Z: A family court decision to share serious abuse findings with Social Work England (with guidance)
Last month, there was a fair bit of media interest around a High Court battle before Mrs Justice Knowles involving a senior social worker who had been found by the family court to have perpetrated domestic abuse towards his ex-partner. HHJ Ahmed, the judge...
‘Somewhere in the history of this case we have lost our humanity’
This is an update on a case I wrote about in September last year - 'Choosing the course which is less stressful to the child'. The hearing before Mrs Justive Lieven last summer concerned applications for care orders by Warwickshire County Council in respect of X and Z...
Deprivation of Liberty and the black mirror
Is removing a mobile phone and access to social media a deprivation of a child’s liberty, or just something that a parent should be entitled to do? Mr Justice Macdonald gives us his answer in Manchester City Council v. P (Refusal of restrictions on mobile phone)...
Transparency in the Family Courts and the Court of Protection: what are the differences?
With the recent launch of the Transparency Reporting Pilot in the family courts, there may be a risk of confusion over some of the terminology, such as “Transparency Orders”, already used in the Court of Protection, and misunderstanding over the role of “legal...
What’s the future for open justice and ‘justice system data’ policy?
“Our justice system is years behind other public services like health and education in collecting and using data to understand performance and impact” says Natalie Byrom, director of research at the Legal Education Foundation (TLEF). “We need a fundamental shift in...
Family Courts scrutinised by the press – but what do we think of the reporting so far?
Nobody who has ever read a newspaper or visited twitter would be expecting new media coverage of the family court, made possible by the ‘reporting pilot’, to be in glowing terms. However, the pilot isn’t a PR exercise, and for transparency to mean anything, we have to...
Royal wills: unsealing the mystery
In a series of earlier posts we have discussed the transparency, or lack of it, in the way the courts deal with wills left by deceased members of the Royal Family. In the case of the late Queen Elizabeth II, her will was not even required to be proved by a grant of...
For her own good – a family court judge authorises the deprivation of a young person’s liberty
Last week at a hearing in Cardiff, His Honour Judge Furness KC made orders authorising measures which amounted to a deprivation of the liberty (DoL) of a teenage girl. I observed the hearing under the new Reporting Pilot that is operating in that court. As noted by...
Whatever happened to the ‘review of the presumption of parental involvement’?
In response to the Harm Report published back in June 2020, the government announced an urgent review of the legal presumption that continuing involvement with both parents is in a child's welfare (introduced and added to the Children Act 1989 in 2014). This...
From our Cardiff Correspondent…
Yesterday I spent the day at Cardiff Family Court. I attended as a legal blogger, making use of the new Reporting Pilot which launched on Monday (having been unable to attend earlier in the week). I observed two hearings, and I will be able to write a bit about those...