Radio 4 Inside The Family Courts

On 13^th November 2024, Radio 4 broadcast a programme entitled “Inside the Family Courts” that dealt with journalists who were present at family court hearings.

Reporters in the Family Courts

Last year, more than a quarter of a million cases were started in the Family Court in England and Wales.  As a family lawyer who has been practising for many years, I am used to hearings in the Family Court being held in private primarily due to the often-sensitive nature of the information being discussed and to protect children from harm.

Since 2009, reporters have been allowed to attend hearings, but they have not been allowed to tell anyone what has happened in court without the permission of the judge, and the court still retains the power to exclude them.

The pilot scheme

A pilot scheme has been operating in about 19 different Courts across England and Wales recently to allow the press-journalists and legal bloggers to report on family cases with strict rules still being held in place in respect of anonymity.  Just last week this was extended to cover private and public family cases in Magistrates Courts in the pilot areas.

The programme investigated whether this would improve the legal system and whether it would give the public more confidence in the legal system by understanding what happens at a court hearing.

The pros and cons

The programme asks the question – is transparency always a good thing?  One of the main contributors to the programme was a Kings Counsel barrister, Lucy Reed who is a family barrister and who is also chair of a group called the Transparency Project. She made the point that it is important to care about these pilot schemes because they deal with intimate aspects of people’s lives.

Family hearings usually involve children and finances in divorce cases, and therefore, judges have initially been resistant to journalists being included in Court hearings. This is not surprising, as they are no doubt concerned about how well a particular journalist or blogger might report a hearing.

Judges might be concerned about mistakes being reported to the public, but the programme made it clear that perhaps a good reason for transparency was to ensure that mistakes, when made, did not happen again.

Personal Testimony from Radio 4 Inside the Family Courts

One contributor to the programme was a father called Joe, who was very honest about his experience of the Family Court. He said he suffered from anxiety throughout the process and felt the Court hearings to be something of an ordeal.

I would recommend that family lawyers and members of the public, if they are interested, should listen to this programme as it went on to deal with many other issues, including quite importantly, the fact that due to this transparency, certain areas of children’s law, such as parental rights in cases of sexual abuse, might be changed.