The Transparency Project: making family court cases clearer
The project consolidated and developed its work after securing grant funding, in 2016, from the Legal Education Foundation (LEF).
About the author
Lucy Reed is chair of the Transparency Project.
T he Transparency Project (TP) began life as a collaborative project run by a group of volunteers in 2014.1 Its main aim was to get better information about family courts ‘out there’ to the public; to correct some of the urban myths and common misunderstandings promulgated in or by the press; and to encourage a healthier, better informed public debate about family justice. Initially, this took the form, primarily, of blogging and writing but, over time, has broadened to include the publication of our own materials for use by professionals and families, the facilitation of events, and speaking and media work.
Our team is made up of a group of practising and academic lawyers (family and information/ media law), legal publishers, journalists and social workers. Many of us are bloggers, and all of us fit in our TP work around our day jobs.
At the point when we launched, ‘transparency’ was very much a buzzword due to the President of the Family Division Sir James Munby’s guidance on the publication of judgments and his known interest in this area.2 Perhaps in the light of this timing, it was, initially, sometimes assumed that we were campaigning for the wholesale opening up of the family courts. In fact, while TP believes that meaningful transparency is not achieved by the mere publication of judgments on BAILII, we do not think that the abandonment of any notion of privacy is a necessary precursor to achieving transparency.
Consequently, our work has been focused on finding ways of ensuring safety and respecting the privacy of individuals, while also meeting the public interest and the need for accessible and detailed information about real cases and the operation of the law and the courts. We think that those dual demands can be balanced, with sufficient thought and care (as articles 8 and 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights require).
We think that there is an imperative to get better at transparency, without harming the individual children and families involved. Otherwise, families are left at the mercy of the often frightening and inaccurate information available on the internet or via the social media grapevine, and they see everything family justice professionals do through those lenses, sometimes putting their own cases at risk.
We expect that many readers of this article will have experience of that first meeting with a client whose view of lawyers and courts is already corroded by the conspiracy theories and horror stories they have read online, or will have spent hours managing the unrealistic or mistaken expectations of a client whose main source of information about the law is social media or a mate who got divorced a few years ago.
It is important to be clear that we take care to maintain a careful distinction between our charitable objectives of the provision of information and facilitation of informed debate, and propaganda for the court system (which we do not do). We host and hold a range of opinions and perspectives at our events and on our blog, and do not shy away from criticism of the system.
From our conversations with professionals and families, and from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) 2000 requests made to local authorities, we identified a number of recurrent ‘hot topics’ that were a source of anxiety, confusion or difficulty for parents and practitioners, and produced guidance notes to help them. The first guidance note was on section 20 of the Children Act 1989, and the second was on parents recording meetings with social workers.
The unique features of these notes are not just that they are written in clear, accessible language, but that they are written explicitly as dual-facing documents for use by both social work (and other) professionals and for families and those supporting them, and are aimed at encouraging social workers and parents to discuss these difficult issues together. We hope that by using the notes as a tool, these issues can be worked through collaboratively and more trusting working relationships formed and maintained.
The notes have been well received, and have themselves generated significant discussion around these areas which, we think, can only be a good thing. With the LEF grant funding, we are planning to extend our range of guidance notes further, and our next topic will be the treatment of domestic violence in the family courts. We would welcome suggestions for further topics for guidance notes.
Our members are writing regularly about family law and transparency issues on the project’s blog, their own blogs or in professional print and online journals. Typically, we blog about topical cases that have hit the press or about cases which are of interest from a transparency point of view (such as those where there have been reporting restriction orders or an unusual approach to privacy was taken, for example, cases heard in open court or where family members are named, or where some point of public interest is apparent from the judgment).
One early driver behind TP was our blogging members’ chronic frustration at poor reporting, and the failure to cross reference to the publicly available judgment on BAILII. We continue to explain cases and correct news reports, and to link to the judgments which, often, are quoted from very selectively.
Some notable stories that we covered were ‘the missing mum case’ (Williams v Minnock and Ethan Freeman Williams (by his guardian)); the Ellie Butler case (R v Butler and Gray) and the Poppi Worthington case. Our coverage of these cases and others has meant that we are often called on for media comment or to speak at events.
In October 2016, we formally launched our Family Court Reporting Watch Project. As this project is now funded, we are able to be more regular and systematic in our monitoring of BAILII and the press. We aim to be more responsive to family court/law news stories as they emerge, although we will inevitably not catch them all. In the first two months after launching, we covered a range of cases and challenged a number of examples of poor reporting, including the following:
- Identifying and seeking correction of an article in several mainstream newspapers about Re W (A Child) [2016] EWCA Civ 793, which mistakenly reported the first instance decision (‘ Grandparents win ‘tragic’ court battle to stop granddaughter they didn’t know existed from being adopted’ ) as the final outcome when, in fact, the Court of Appeal had overturned that decision and remitted the matter for a rehearing. We think that the confusion arose from the later publication of the first instance decision, when a journalist failed to make the connection between the two cases. We blogged about this, and pursued it with the Daily Mirror and the Sun, securing corrections in both cases.
- Explaining the removal of a seven-year-old boy from the care of his mother, who said that he was transgender (Re J (a minor) [2016] EWHC 2430 (Fam) and Re J (a minor) [2016] EWHC 2595 (Fam)) .
- We have written about In the Matter of X (A Child) (No 3) [2016] EWHC 2755 (Fam), in which parents, who were exonerated in the criminal court, had sought to reopen findings made in the family court in order to secure return of their adopted child; however, having had a change of heart the parents were refused permission to withdraw their application.
- We have written about a covert recording case in which TP had some involvement.
In November 2016, we were able to publish the results of a FOIA study into the vexed topic of ‘adoption targets’ . We had hoped to be able to bring some clarity to this area, which is a source of great anxiety for parents, and about which there has been much speculation and little evidence. While our work has established that adoption targets are indeed being used by some local authorities in England, we have been unable to get a clear handle on the extent of this, how such targets operate in practice or what impact they have on individual decisions. We have called for further work to be done on this topic.
We are learning a lot in the course of our work about how the press operates and some of the economic and practical barriers, from their perspective, to better reporting. Although we have a track record for robust challenge of poor reporting, we do not think that it is helpful to simply press-bash , and want to engage in constructive debate with the press about this to see how we can work through these issues.
We hope to hold a media event, in early 2017, to launch our media guide to reporting in the family courts, which we hope will be attended both by the press and those from the various disciplines working in the family justice system. We are following transparency and access to justice developments closely and, in particular, work on the anonymisation of judgments and promised further consultation from Sir James on further transparency reform.
May I encourage you to take a look at the TP website and ask those of you who ‘do’ social media to follow us on Twitter, like our Facebook page and subscribe to our weekly e-mails . We remain committed to hosting a range of views about family courts and transparency issues, and have always been happy to host guest blog posts on the project’s site. If you would like to write a blog, to post or become involved with the project, do please get in touch!
- Visit: www.transparencyproject.org.uk
- Available at: http://tinyurl.com/zl93eas