Transparency rules are now in place across almost the whole of the family justice system. It is easy to be in favour of transparency in principle but still want to keep the intimate details of your own clients’ family disputes out of the limelight. This article considers how that can be achieved in this new era of openness.

The Transparency Rules

In January this year, pilot schemes that had been trialled across a number of courts since 2023 were formalised in a new Practice Direction 12R to the Family Procedure Rules. Applying first to public law hearings before judges and extended to private law hearings before judges from 1 May 2025, the new practice direction will also apply to children hearings before magistrates from 29 September 2025.

Meanwhile, the separate scheme for financial remedy cases, while still technically a pilot, was extended to cover all courts on 29 January 2025.

Structure

Both schemes (children and financial) operate in a similar way. Under both schemes, a ‘reporter’ (who could be an accredited member of the press or a lawyer attending for journalistic, research or public legal education purposes) can sit in and observe almost any family court hearings (with certain exceptions, such as financial dispute resolution hearings in financial remedy proceedings and non-lawyer reviews in Family Drug and Alcohol Courts).

If a reporter attends the hearing, then the court will make a transparency order prescribing the information that anyone (including the reporter and the parties) can and cannot put in the public domain. In the case of children proceedings, the template order remains in force until the 18th birthday of the youngest child. The financial remedies template order has no standard end date but is to be kept under review by the court at each hearing.

Aims

The aim of the schemes is not an invitation for parties and their children to be identified, but to provide a mechanism for the system, and individual decisions made within it, to be held up to a greater level of public scrutiny than was possible simply through the publication of judgments.

The restrictions in the transparency orders are designed to allow examination of the decisions without having to identify any of the individuals involved. They are not intended to subvert the rules or case law protecting the anonymity of children within court proceedings, an outcome that seems to have been confirmed in the recent decision of Harris J in M v F and C [2025] EWHC 801 (Fam).

The fundamental change is that there is now a presumption that reports of proceedings can be published and the court would need to be persuaded why they shouldn’t be. Efforts to stop reporters attending have been slapped down by the courts (see Tickle v Father [2023] EWHC 2446 (Fam)).

Written judgments

A second limb of transparency that receives less attention is the President’s push to have more Family Court judgments published. His direction that district judges should publish five family judgments a year, and Circuit judges between five and 10, was communicated to the judiciary during 2023 and formally confirmed in a practice guidance note in June 2024.

Although the judiciary is currently nowhere near coming close to meeting these targets (at least in part due to the time required for anonymisation), practitioners need to be alert to the risk of any judgment (at any stage of proceedings) being published. After all, if judges start complying with the guidance we can expect somewhere in the region of 6,000 published lower court judgments a year.

Based on the guidance, at particular risk of being published are judgments with the following features:

  • consider novel points of law or establish a legal precedent;
  • where publication would be in the public interest;
  • a written judgment already exists in a publishable form (this would include any case where a written judgment is given, but also where a party has requested a transcript – an unexpected consequence of appealing, perhaps);
  • contested fact-finding hearings;
  • final decisions in financial remedy, s 8 and care proceedings;
  • successful appeals;
  • decisions, whether final or interim, involving significant litigation misconduct or disproportionate litigation; and
  • judgments in proceedings that have been attended by a ‘reporter’.

Anonymisation

The guidance, and template transparency orders, contains strict guidelines on the information that must not be published in order to protect the anonymity of the parties and their children. While this might be sufficient to prevent jigsaw identification in most children cases, the level of information about parties’ ages, locations, professions and key dates still regularly included even in anonymised financial remedy judgments often means that parties can be identified – at least by those who know them.

Except in the rarest of cases where the court gives specific permission for the disclosure of protected details, children are generally protected by the terms of s 12 of the Administration of Justice Act 1960 and s 97(2) of the Children Act 1989.

Neither of these statutes apply, however, to financial remedies proceedings. At present, most litigants in financial remedy proceedings achieve anonymity by convention. The latest guidance appears to enshrine that by use of transparency orders and a default rubric that records that failure to preserve the anonymity of participants ‘may be a contempt of court’.

It has been argued forcefully, both judicially and extra-judicially by Sir Nicholas Mostyn and the former President of the Family Division, Sir James Munby, that such threats are baseless, and the practice that has developed of anonymising financial remedy judgments is contrary to clear House of Lords authority stretching back at least as far as Scott v Scott in 1912.

It would take a brave party, or reporter, to identify parties in breach of the reporting rubric, but there is clearly an arguable justification for someone who chooses to do so, and parties need to submit to a final hearing with such a possibility in mind. All it may take is one case where someone wants publicity and the other does not (Kyle Walker and Lauren Goodman come to mind) and the Court of Appeal will have the opportunity to withdraw anonymity from financial remedy judgments across the board.

Avoiding publication

For the time being, a party keen to avoid the details of their case being published (even if only on an anonymised basis) should at least consider the following:

  • If a reporter turns up, applying to prevent them attending. But, the test for excluding them is high, and the court has come down heavily on judges who have done so unnecessarily (see Tickle v Father). The Transparency Project guide What to do if a reporter attends (or wants to attend) your hearing is required reading.
  • If you have a choice, keep financial remedy proceedings out of London – a disproportionate number of published lower court financial remedy judgments are currently coming out of the Central Family Court and its overflow court at the Royal Courts of Justice, as well as elsewhere around the South East.
  • Apply for a more restrictive transparency order (but be aware that this may provide the determined opponent with a route to test them in the Court of Appeal).
  • Do not appeal or otherwise request a transcript.
  • Do not do anything to make the case ‘interesting’, which would include incurring such costs, or behaving so badly, that a judge may wish to publicly admonish your client.
  • Arbitrate.
  • Settle. 
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