An issue that the authors observe, somewhat anecdotally, arising in practice is the tendency of referencing (and often directly quoting from) proceedings under the Act in FRPs. This regrettably includes counsel’s documentation filed with the Family Court. It is important to adhere to the prohibition on disclosing papers from proceedings under the Act into FRPs, particularly with the growing movement towards transparency and open justice in the Family Court.

The President of the Family Division’s report Confidence and Confidentiality: Transparency in the Family Courts, published in October 2021, talks of ‘squaring the circle’ between the competing needs of enhancing public confidence in the Family Court and maintaining the parties’ confidentiality. The President stated that the current system does not adequately permit public scrutiny or accountability and there needs to be a major shift in order to increase transparency, subject to ensuring the anonymity of the subject children and the family.

In the case of BT v CU that followed,[4] Justice Mostyn, while preserving the parties’ anonymity in that case, clearly heralded that ‘my default position from now on will be to publish financial remedy judgments in full without anonymisation, save that any children will continue to be granted anonymity’.[5] He reiterated this view in A v M[6] and undertook a thorough overview of the law on anonymity, going right back to the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857, in Xanthopoulos v Rakshina.[7]

Similarly, in the 2022 case of Gallagher v Gallagher,[8] Mostyn J referred to ‘partial privacy’ in financial remedy hearings and distinguished the ‘secrecy’ in children proceedings to those cases not falling within s.12 of the 1960 Act.[9] The court remarked: