By Lara Feigel
Canary Wharf feels an unlikely location for a family court. Its sleek riverside bars and sturdy Victorian colonnades feel like a setting for financiers trading derivatives and assets rather than for sparring parents, arguing at best about neglected homework and forgotten football boots and at worst about unexplained bruises and tears of terror. But it’s here that I set out on a new undertaking as a court reporter on a rainy May day, after an afternoon of training with Louise Tickle that has left me more nervous than when I began, preparing anxiously to hold my own against barristers set on evicting me from the courtroom.
The transparency pilot assumes that journalists will be allowed into the courtroom and will be allowed to report, issued with the standard Transparency Order that preserves anonymity for parents and children but allows the details of the case to be made public. Under Practice Direction FPR27.11, a journalist may be excluded only where it is ‘necessary’ in the interests of the child, the safety or protection of parties or others, or the orderly conduct of proceedings.
I am beginning in East London because I’ve been told that it’s a court that’s favourably inclined towards journalists. They have assigned a judge to oversee transparency, and all the court staff are aware that journalists have the right to attend. I’ve notified the court that I am coming but don’t know any of the details of the cases I am attending. You can tell from the listings if a case is private or public law and if it’s scheduled to last the entire day or only a part of the day, but beyond that you take your chances, unless someone involved in the case has gotten in touch. I am here on spec and, after the distinctively humiliating bag check that all the courts inflict on their visitors, I wait in the corridor for the first case of the day with District Judge Coupland.
This court occupies two upper floors in an office block, and there’s very little sign in the corridors that it’s the setting for the nation’s justice to be meted out. Fifty years ago, warring parents all over London went to the Royal Courts of Justice for their family law decisions and had a rather different experience, arriving in that cathedral-like gothic building and walking past the sculptures intended by the architect George Edmund Street to represent four male pillars of the English legal tradition: Jesus, Moses, Alfred the Great and Solomon – that king who mooted the ultimate kind of 50:50 custody, threatening to cut a child in half. Now there are five London courts, and this one has been erected in makeshift fashion within this office block, its corridors and courtrooms windowless and carpeted. I wait in one of the blank corridors while lawyers and parents rush past. The first case is scheduled to start at 10am, but at 10.03, the father hasn’t found his lawyer, and the mother’s solicitor can’t find either the mother’s counsel or the mother herself and is on the phone, frantically trying to get her computer mended before the hearing. Then, suddenly and inexplicably, everyone is ready, and we assemble in the courtroom.
My presence is the first item on the agenda, as it always will be. Thankfully, given this is my first case, no one suggests I should be excluded. I say that I’ll wait to let them know if I require a Transparency Order and it turns out that I don’t. This is a Private Law Directions Hearing for a case that’s been going on for some time. The parties have now negotiated a settlement, and the judge is just here to talk through the details.
At 12 o’clock, I file back in with another set of parents and their sparser set of representatives. This mother is meant to have an interpreter, but the court has failed to appoint one. The mother also hasn’t yet filed a witness statement. This is the first of many cases that I attend that has to be rescheduled because of a clerical error in the courts. It will become clear that hours and hours of high-priced legal time are wasted, and children’s lives are suspended because there is so little money for the admin staff and systems that actually keep the wheels of justice turning. It will become more and more clear how much of a blight on our society’s capacity to pursue justice the threadbare approach to funding the legal system has become. And so another date is set, and we file back out, and I walk to join the traders and speculators in one of the sweaty, dark shopping centre coffee shops that seem the only nearby options for a quick lunch.
In the afternoon, I try visiting another courtroom – this one presided over by Circuit Judge Her Honour Judge Purkiss. This time I do apply for a Transparency Order straight away, unopposed by the aunt and grandmother, who are the only parties in the dispute present today, along with a social worker. This case is about a young girl whose mother has died. The girl – let’s call her Sophie – has been living with her grandmother and aunt since her mother’s death, and they now want to apply to have exclusive parental responsibility for Sophie because they see her father as a danger to her.
‘She sees me as a second mum,’ her aunt says. ‘I want to support her throughout her life.’
‘What is it about the father that’s a danger to the child?’ the judge asks; due to yet another clerical error somewhere in the system, the social worker’s report advising that the father should be excluded from his daughter’s life hasn’t been made available to her. It turns out that the father has previously served time for bodily harm. He’s now out on probation and had the chance to come to the hearing but isn’t here. He’s categorised as presenting a ‘medium risk’ of harm to Sophie.
‘He’s very violent towards any women,’ Sophie’s grandmother tells the judge. ‘He was violent with his own mother.’ He’s blocked them from applying for a passport for Sophie and from opening a bank account. They need to have parental responsibility for her so they can help her move on with her life.
Brisk, kindly, Judge Purkiss organises the next hearing. The father is to be served by post. The grandmother is asked to write a statement saying what she has told the court today. She’s worried about doing this, so she’s told she can write it by hand if that’s easier. We are far away now from the suited barristers of the morning’s cases, with their laptops and sheaves of neatly categorised documents. Here, a grandmother is sent away to hand write a statement saying what she thinks it will take to keep safe a child who recently lost her mother. We can’t yet know what the next hearing will bring, but the two women leave this one feeling a step closer to protecting their granddaughter and niece. For that hour, the windowless courtroom has felt more like a classroom than a great office of state. And in it, justice of a desperate, limping kind has been set in motion.
Blog post published on 6th November 2024
This is part one of a four-part series. For the other posts visit our main family court blog page
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