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Britain’s most senior family judge yesterday lifted a prohibition on the publication of details of a care proceedings case so that the public could form its own view of the behaviour of the local authority in the case, Medway Council in Kent, and the decisions of the court to date.

The highly unusual move came after an application by The Times and a series of articles questioning the “secrecy” of the family courts and the lack of redress afforded those caught up in the family justice system.

The decision of Sir Mark Potter, President of the Family Division, is welcome. But it would be wrong to categorise family judges as only acting defensively in the face of a barrage of press criticism or being on the back foot.

What they call the “privacy” (rather than the “secrecy”) of the family courts results from a recent policy decision by ministers. Many family judges have been only too keen to have greater openness of proceedings so that their decisions can be seen to be fair and they can rebut criticisms of bias.

Judges may seem to be an obvious target as the decision-makers. But as another recent case highlighted so well, they are often best placed to ensure that injustices are rectified — or if it is too late, that they are not repeated.

New guidelines from judges, to be publicised this month, will warn against the flouting of adoption procedures by local authorities who try to rush through adoptions against parents’ wishes. Such councils will face challenges in the courts, senior judges say.

Their recommendations follow a case in which a council was castigated for its “wholly unacceptable abuse of power” in racing through an adoption of an 18-month child and blocking a challenge by the father.

In May the Court of Appeal ruled that East Sussex County Council had acted unlawfully when it proceeded with an adoption placement, a day before the father was due to fight his daughter’s removal in court.

The judges condemned the council’s conduct as “disgraceful” and said that it had deliberately set out to prevent the father from being heard in court by keeping him “in the dark”.

Copies of their ruling, which gives guidance for future cases, are going to all family judges who hear adoption proceedings, to every adoption agency in England and Wales and will be publicised by the British Agency for Adoption and Fostering in its journal which is due out shortly.

The judges were unusually strong in their condemnation. In his ruling Lord Justice Wall said that the practice followed by the council was “unacceptable and must not be repeated”.

Such behaviour gave ammunition to those who criticised the family justice system, he said, for “administering ‘secret’ justice and who attack social workers as a group for their arrogance and the manner in which they abuse their functions by both removing children from their parents unlawfully and by stifling legitimate parental responses”.

Any local authority who sought to behave similarly would almost certainly find itself challenged by way of judicial review, he added.

His comments, made a few weeks ago, chime exactly with concerns highlighted in the Times in a series of recent articles. In an eloquent expression of the views of parents involved with care or adoption cases, Lord Justice Wall said: “There is no more emotive subject for most parents than the adoption of their children by strangers; it is even more emotive than their child being taken into care.”

He went on: “In my judgment, a fair process is essential. Justice must not only be done but be seen to be done. This is even more important in cases involving children, which are heard in private.”

The council in this case had “quite deliberately set out to prevent the father from being heard. No other inference can be drawn from its conduct.” Its conduct, he added, was “an abuse of power and wholly unacceptable”.

He added that the social workers in question had not only been “inadequately managed” they did not appear to have been properly trained.

“Worse than that, they do not appear to see the need for good management. It is, I think, the arrogance of the agency’s behaviour in this case which is its most shocking aspect.”

The child in the case was born in November 2006 to parents who had had a casual relationship. The father, known only as MC, did not know he was the father until the council served care proceedings on him and asked him for a DNA test. At the time the child was with her mother but the council recommended adoption.

The Court of Appeal was told that at the time the father was served with proceedings, he was in hospital after a heart attack and so took no part. Eventually he learnt of the adoption plans once the child, known as J-L, was in the care of foster parents. He immediately alerted his solicitors who immediately contacted the council and applied for permission to revoke the placement order at Brighton County Court. The hearing was due to take place on January 30; the day before the hearing, the council ratified the adoption panel’s decision.

Lord Justice Thorpe criticised the council for failing to respond promptly to the father’s solicitors’ inquiries and said he had suffered a “manifest injustice”. That failure and the placement of the child on the eve of the hearing “give rise to the clearest inference that the council as out to gain its end by means more foul than fair”.

The council said after the case that it was reviewing its procedures in the light of the judges’ comments although it insisted that it would not have been in the child’s best interests to delay the adoption process further.

In such a case, the judges have done their bit. They must also ensure that the lower courts act with similar vigilance. It is also up to the General Social Care Council and local authorities to take any appropriate disciplinary action.

Closed family courts do not help the judges’ cause - not least because critics are tempted to lay the entire system’s failings at their door - when they are only trying to put right injustice when they find it.

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