Secretive family courts will be opened to the media 'to lift the veil' on cases such as Baby P


Jack Straw said allowing the media into cases would allow better accountability, for instance in cases like Baby P

Jack Straw said allowing the media into cases would allow better accountability in situations such as Baby P

Family courts will be opened up to public scrutiny by 'major' reforms, Jack Straw pledged yesterday.

The Justice Secretary said that in future approved journalists would be allowed into the normally secret hearings.

Judges and magistrates would still have the right to close their courts to protect the privacy of children and families, or to protect witnesses, but Mr Straw said that the 'default position' should be to allow reporting on family proceedings.

'Many argue that the current provisions to safeguard privacy and confidentiality go too far, leaving family courts unfairly open to accusations of bias or even injustice,' he said.

Mr Straw argued that social workers and doctors in such cases who are incompetent should not have their reputations shielded by secrecy.

The law will be also changed to ensure no one can identify any child named in a case, he added.

'If you are a structural engineer and you do the calculations for a bridge, and the bridge falls down, you will go to court and have no protection in those proceedings about your privacy,' the Justice Secretary said.

'People could be killed and your professional competence will be an issue. I don't see any reason in principle why other professionals in the field of child protection should have their professional competence immune from public examination.'

The new rules will be tested next spring in pilot projects in Leeds, Wolverhampton and Cardiff.

But the most senior family judge, President of the Family Division Sir Mark Potter, said: 'The judiciary are united in opposing the Government's proposals to review whether privacy should remain the rule in respect of adoption proceedings.'

The veil around family court decisions has come under growing criticism that has been intensified by disruptive protests from groups like Fathers 4 Justice and concern raised by facts made public in high-profile criminal cases like those of Baby P and Shannon Matthews.

The family courts currently hear around 20,000 cases each year in which local authority social workers are trying to take children from their families and put them in state care, or find adoptive families for them.

Another 100,000 family cases involve disputes over custody and contact for children following divorce or family breakup.

In 2006 Tony Blair's justice minister Harriet Harman proposed opening up the family courts to approved journalists.

But her plans were crushed the following year by then Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer, who gave as his reason a poll of 200 children who said they would not like it if their cases were publicised.

A further reason to doubt the enthusiasm of judges is the record of the Court of Protection, a branch of the High Court opened last year to deal with cases involving the financial and medical affairs of incapacitated adults.

Ministers said its deliberations should usually be open to the media.

But, although its work has generated great controversy among lawyers, the Court has yet to open a single case to the public or journalists, and has failed to publish any of its thousands of judgements.

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