A significant decision has been made by Mr Justice Poole in the High Court, allowing a journalist access to a number of psychological reports that were commissioned in family proceedings. Although when a Transparency Order (TO) is made under the Reporting Provisions a journalist or legal blogger can be given copies of certain court documents, this list doesn’t include expert witness reports or Cafcass reports. A second important feature of this judgment is that the journalist successfully applied for access to some documents in cases where she hadn’t been to court to get a TO.
It may in future be easier for reporters to obtain permission to read a wider range of documents, when they can show this is in the public interest. The judgment is Jessica Bradley v CM & Ors [2026] EWHC 125 (Fam).
There are various helpful points made in this judgment about open justice in family court reporting. We’ll highlight them below – the judgment, although clearly written, is long. There was a total of 14 parties, although not all had lawyers. The psychologist (who is regulated by the HCPC) was represented by barrister Kate Wilson, well known for her specialism in media and privacy law. The journalist was represented pro bono by Charlotte Proudman, also well known as an advocate in family courts. In three of the cases, a Cafcass guardian had instructed solicitors and counsel. The children in one case were 15 and 17 and didn’t have a guardian appointed.
The journalist’s application
Jessica Bradley wrote an investigative article for the Sheffield Tribune – “The ‘harmful pseudo-science’ infecting Sheffield’s Family Courts” on 9 August 2025. In it she reported that psychologist Dr Maria Downs was diagnosing ‘parental alienation syndrome’ despite this concept being discredited by the Family Justice Council, amongst others. Ms Bradley quoted (anonymously) a mother who’d been involved in one case where her and her daughter’s allegations of abuse by her ex-partner had been ignored and they were ordered to undertake joint therapy. The mother attributed this to a report by Dr Downs. A subsequent judgment reversed the decisions that the mother believed were dangerous, but she expressed concern about the impact of Dr Downs on other families in court. It later emerged that Ms Bradley had applied to court to see a copy of Dr Downs’ report and the court had sent it to her in error. (We’ll call this Case 5).
Ms Bradley quoted from mothers in five cases where Dr Downs had been appointed to carry out psychological assessments of mothers in private law proceedings. She went to court in one case (Case 1) and got a Transparency Order that allowed her to see certain standard documents, including court orders. The standard template however doesn’t include expert reports.
Ms Bradley then applied to see extra documents, namely Dr Downs’ reports; the Cafcass reports; final court orders and judgment – in four of the five cases. These we’re calling Cases 1-4. She’d only been to court in Cases 1 and 5.
The families in the cases
The children in Cases 1-4 ranged from five to 17 years old. Poole J wanted the views of all those who were old enough to express an understanding of the consequences so he could take these into account. None of the (older) children objected to the application, although the three guardians opposed it. The mothers in all the cases supported the application although one was doubtful her children would want to be asked about it. The fathers in all four cases opposed the application.
A judgment in Case 1 is published here – Re C a child [2025] EWFC 47(B). The other cases haven’t any published judgments. The case involved an unsuccessful transfer of residence from her mother to her father, for a child now aged 12.
Case 2 involved allegations of alienation and fabricated illness. The father withdrew his application and there were no findings made by a court about any allegations. There were two reports by Dr Downs.
Case 3 was resolved with a consent order for children to continue to live with their mother and have defined unsupervised contact with their father. Dr Downs’ report had described the children as ‘splitting’.
Case 4 was similarly resolved as Case 3. Dr Downs diagnosed narcissistic and histrionic personality traits in both parents.
Decision by Mr Justice Poole
The judge condensed the applications as:
- An application under FPR r29.12 to see documents on the court file in Cases 1-4, further to those already available to Ms Bradley under the TO in Case 1.
- An application under the inherent jurisdiction for permission to publish and communicate the contents of Dr Downs’ reports, the final orders, and the unpublished judgments in Cases 1-4.
There was only one TO (Case 1) and the court rules don’t allow retrospective TOs when there’d been no journalist attending. The court therefore applied the open justice principle to Ms Bradley’s application to access the further documents.
The judge said that Ms Bradley had a genuine public interest in Dr Downs’ reports. The Cafcass guardians for the children and Dr Downs argued that the reports contained deeply personal information about each family. Although the older children hadn’t objected, the judge noted that they might not all be aware just how much detail about their parents might have been included.
The judge weighed up the article 8 and article 10 issues and concluded that most of the information applied for should be made available. He pointed out how difficult it is for a reporter with an interest in a particular topic to find cases to attend that will help with her research. Ms Bradley couldn’t fully assert her article 10 rights if she was restricted to reading relevant documents from only the hearing she’d been to. He said:
Making Transparency Orders when journalists or legal bloggers attend a hearing will not assist the many journalists and bloggers who may become aware of a case of potential public interest only after the case has been heard. [para 86]
In order for Ms Bradley to publish from the judgment, Poole J ordered that three of the judgments amongst all those in Cases 1-4 should now be published on TNA, so that they were in the public realm.
With regard to the court orders, relevant ones were to be anonymised and made available to Ms Bradley.
With regard to the reports, the judge specified which passages Ms Bradley would be permitted to quote from, because some restrictions were necessary to protect the children’s and Dr Downs’ privacy rights.
We very much hope that this decision by Poole J will open the door to courts being more flexible in allowing reporters wider access to information relevant to cases they want to investigate in the public interest.
Some other transparency points
The current case law is handily set out in paras 35 – 58 which will be a useful reference point in future cases.
The judge describes Dr Downs’ reports (from a few years ago) as ‘long, upwards from 90 pages’. The current limit in PD 27A is 40 pages so reporters shouldn’t necessarily feel put off by the potential length of psychological reports.
There’s discussion about the burden of anonymising court orders especially if many are requested. The TO template refers to:
16.
a. Documents drafted by advocates (or litigants if a party is self-representing): i.e. Case outlines, skeleton arguments, summaries, position statements threshold documents and chronologies.
b. Any indices from the Court bundle.
c. Any suitably anonymised Orders within the case.
As Poole J observes, the task of anonymising orders goes well beyond the actual rules, and he doesn’t know why. In fact Ms Bradley had already been sent some orders which hadn’t been anonymised. (In cases we’ve attended, copy orders we receive are very rarely anonymised. It makes no sense to try to do that if we’ve heard everyone’s names in court. So we could say that ‘suitably’ means it’s not essential.)
The judge couldn’t be certain whether or not Ms Bradley and the mother she’d interviewed in Case 5 had potentially been in contempt of court, because he hadn’t been given a copy of the court file in Case 5 and he didn’t know what that TO said and what the court had allowed them to do. However, he did know that the court shouldn’t have sent a journalist the psychological report simply on her request without checking with a judge – he’d seen an exchange of emails about this. Poole J had only been asked to adjudicate on Cases 1 – 4. He didn’t find that anyone had shared too much information in those cases. However he thought it important to give some guidance about what had gone wrong in Case 5, where there’d certainly been that risk.
Although Dr Downs’ barrister argued that Ms Bradley had inaccurately described Dr Downs as using the term ‘parental alienation syndrome’ in her reports, and that Ms Bradley had taken a fixed position on parents’ rights, the judge emphasised that it is not the court’s role to exert editorial control over how a journalist (within the relevant restrictions) chooses to report.
Image: Confidential, Nick Youngson, creative commons licence at Alpha Stock Images