Family Court reporting pilot “risks failure” without improvement in flow of information between court and press, says Family President

A review of the family court reporting pilot carried out by the Transparency Implementation Group (TIG) has highlighted “issues that require guidance”.

The reporting pilot was launched in family courts in Cardiff, Leeds and Carlisle on 30 January 2023.

The President of the Family Division, Sir Andrew McFarlane, said the aim of the pilot was to introduce “a presumption that accredited media and legal bloggers may report on what they see and hear during family court cases, subject to strict rules of anonymity”.

Reviewing the first few months of the pilot, the TIG found there is “a poverty of information at present in the published court lists”.

To remedy this, together with HM Courts and Tribunals Service, the TIG has suggested a solution to ensure that court lists contain “sufficient information to allow pilot reporters to make decisions about which cases to observe and report on”.

This project is called ‘Making Lists Better’.

In his April bulletin, Sir Andrew McFarlane said: “Without an improvement in the flow of information between the court and the press, the pilot risks failure, and hearings will continue to take longer with reporters going into hearings without any information”.

The bulletin noted that the future intention is that the public court list will contain a “series of codes for cases falling within the pilot”. The codes will correspond to a “code breaker”, which lists the issues involved in the case.

“The issues will be identified by the gatekeeping judge or legal adviser, who will make an Order as part of gatekeeping that the case appears on the list in a certain way”, revealed the Family President.

It was also revealed that the practice of not naming local authorities on court lists will cease.

Cases normally appear as ‘Re: A Child’, however they will now appear as ‘Leeds City Council v A Child’, so the pilot reporter “knows which local authority is involved and can direct any enquiries accordingly”, the bulletin revealed.

The reporting pilot has now also been extended to cover private law child cases (from 15 May 2023).

Lottie Winson