I began writing about parents whose children were being removed by social workers after two chance meetings. One was with a couple who had taken their daughter to A&E with a leg injury, only to have both their children forcibly removed into care and returned only after a legal battle. The other was with a mother whose daughter had said that Daddy, who never lived with them, was touching her in bad places. A psychiatrist who never met them, and was not cross-examined in court, said that she had coached her daughter to lie. She was sent to live with a man her mother thinks is a paedophile.

As I spoke to more parents, patterns emerged which convinced me that these two cases were not aberrations. England and Wales are operating a secret state, where almost any discussion of your case is prevented to protect the “privacy of the child”. Where courts only need the word of an “expert” to remove your child. And where some social workers are jumping to wholly erroneous conclusions which tear families apart.

Court of Appeal judges played an important role. Judges such as Justice Judge, Ryder and McFarlane all chose to make public their scathing indictments of local authorities, social workers and/or expert witnesses in individual cases. They made it possible for me to write about those cases.

Sir Mark Potter presided over the High Court this summer, where The Times challenged some reporting restrictions in the case of a man who was jailed for helping his wife to help her son escape from foster care. Sir Mark, in a spirit of openness, released more documents to The Times than we had hoped for — documents that reinforce my belief that that case is a gross miscarriage of justice.

Sir Mark's call for the opening of the family courts to the media is significant. He believes that greater scrutiny will show that the courts generally work well. The argument I have always made is that we should put that to the test. I believe that some social services departments and experts are consistently seeing abuse, especially “emotional harm”, where there is none. And that some local authorities are flagrantly ignoring the legal requirement that there should be minimum intervention in family life. We cannot prove that until the courts are opened up.

There is a powerful lobby against openness, made up of those with a vested interest in avoiding scrutiny. Sir Mark's comments today will surely help to shift the power towards those who want to open up the secret state and let the public judge for themselves.

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