Some years ago when he was Home Secretary, Jack Straw wanted to visit a youth court. It was to prove a salutary lesson in the extent to which the family courts are closed, even to a government minister.

Recalling the occasion in an interview with The Times, Mr Straw – now the Justice Secretary – said: “The bench had a debate about whether to allow me in. I thought they were being ridiculous. Justice has to be seen to be done. It’s a very profound point about the operation of the justice system.”

As Justice Secretary, he is now in a position to right the balance. In one of the most fundamental reforms to the way that the family courts operate, he announced yesterday that from April 1 journalists will be able to attend family court proceedings and report on cases.

The main stipulation is that they do not name the parties or give out personal details that would allow them to be identified. “It will be open to parties to apply to court for specific reporting restrictions,” Mr Straw said. “But my hope is that the courts are reluctant to grant these.”

It is a move for which The Times has campaigned vociferously, arguing that keeping the media out of certain courts has led to miscarriages of justice. The Times has received hundreds of letters from people who have been gagged and powerless to challenge the decisions of social workers and other experts.

For a long time, pleas to open the family courts were rejected. Questions about how social workers and other experts made decisions, and whether the right children were taken into care – raised most recently by the cases of Shannon Matthews and Baby P – were met with the mantra that family privacy is paramount, and that professionals must remain anonymous. Yet if you are a parent wrongly accused of abusing your child, you do not want the kind of privacy that prevents you from discussing your case. If you are a child tortured by a relative under the nose of the State, you do not want the kind of secrecy that protects professionals from scrutiny.

So what has changed? Talking before his announcement in the House of Commons on Tuesday, Mr Straw credited The Times with having brought the issue to his attention “more graphically than it would otherwise have done”. He said: “You have to deal with shedloads of issues in jobs like this . . . if something isn’t a particular issue at the time, you don’t go searching around for it. I commend The Times for running such a professional campaign.”

It is also clear that Mr Straw feels passionately about the issue. “It has been a closed world,” he said. “If justice is open, there is a greater chance that standards will rise and that egregious practices may be spotted before they become harmful.”

Does he believe that there are egregious practices? “You can’t know, because not even I would be able to enter a family court at the moment. The jargon is ‘private, not secret’ – but the public could be forgiven for not making the distinction,” he said.

The second big change announced by Mr Straw is equally dramatic. At present it is rare for a judge to name the local authority, let alone the social workers or the expert witnesses in a case. Judges in the Court of Appeal have strongly criticised social workers without saying for which council they work. Elected councillors remain unaware that their own staff have been condemned.

“There should be no restriction on naming social workers or medical experts unless it could lead to the identification of [children],” Mr Straw said. “I know there are arguments that doctors would be less willing to come forward [to serve as expert witnesses] if they were going to be named, but I happen to think that if you are professional you have to justify your professionalism in public.”

There is one clear disappointment. A clause in the Adoption Act 2002 means that journalists will not be able to sit in on proceedings when a formal application to adopt is made. That is usually the last stage, but some of the most controversial cases are those that end in adoption. Mr Straw is promising legislation to overcome this problem, but he will need to remain firm if he is not to be derailed by the parliamentary timetable.

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