Bradley v CM & others

A journalist, Jessica Bradley, applied for access to documents and permission to report them in four private law family cases. She had attended a hearing in one of the cases, where a Transparency Order had been made. In support of her application, she relied upon it being in the public interest because of the recent attention given by family judges to Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS), it having been discredited, and the issue of allegations of alienating behaviour in family cases. The documents sought by the journalist were orders, judgments, Cafcass reports and the expert reports of Dr Maria Downs, a clinical psychologist who had been appointed by the court in all four cases.

In all cases, one parent supported and the other parent opposed the application. In two of the cases there were children’s guardians who opposed the application, in a third the children’s guardian had been unable to speak to the children before the hearing because the mother prevented contact, and in the fourth there was no guardian. After the hearing, Poole J directed that the children in those latter two cases be contacted and their views obtained if possible. In both, the children either supported or did not oppose the application.

Dr Downs’ position was that anonymised judgments and orders would satisfy the open justice principle and public interest engaged. She expressed concerns that a previous article by the applicant had misrepresented her work. She opposed the application for all her reports to be provided and publishable. They contained detailed accounts of her conversations with the parents and children, including highly personal matters, where they had been told that it was for the purpose of the court proceedings. The reports also contained information about third parties and Dr Downs’ detailed psychological assessments [J67, J118-121].

All parties agreed that, were any aspect of the application granted, the identities of the children should be protected.

Should the journalist have access to all the documents sought from the Court file?

How would the Court address the application for access to unpublished judgments where there is guidance governing the publication of judgments, which are then accessible to everyone, on the same footing?

Should the journalist be permitted to report the content of documents?

Judgments: There were unpublished judgments on the court file in three of the claims, namely judgments given in February 2022, January 2023 and August 2025. Poole J granted the journalist access to them, but not permission to publish from them. Instead, he directed that a copy of his judgment be sent to the relevant Family Court judges, inviting them to publish their earlier judgments, anonymised in accordance with Poole J’s judgment. Such an approach was consistent with the guidance by the President of the Family Division, “Publication of Judgments – Practice Guidance”, June 2024 and earlier guidance [J108-114 & J136-138].

Orders: Poole J noted that more than 50 Orders had been made across the four family cases, but many were case management orders and it would be an undue burden on HMCTS or a party to have to anonymise all orders in all four cases. Instead, the judge identified six orders to be anonymised by the guardian’s representative in the relevant case (where there was one) or by the court (where there was not). They were to be provided to the applicant.

Expert reports: The applicant was granted access to Dr Downs’ psychological reports, but Poole J held that “it is necessary and proportionate to restrict publication of the contents of those reports” [J142], and he limited what the applicant would be able to publish. That was largely confined to a limited number of paragraphs which contained Dr Downs’ summaries of her conclusions or directly addressed child arrangements, but did not permit publication of the detailed rehearsal of Dr Downs’ conversations with family members or her psychological assessments of them [143-145].

Cafcass: The court also granted access to Cafcass reports, and no application was pursued to publish any information from them [149].

The Court applied the established approach to the competing interests involved, namely considerations of open justice, the public interest in understanding the work of the Family Court, the particular attention to parental alienation, and the parties’ Convention rights. For practitioners, Poole J’s observations on procedure are likely to be of some interest.

The applicant had originally applied for “retrospective transparency orders”. The Family Procedure Rules do not provide for such orders. The application should have been made pursuant to FPR 29.12 and to relax s.12 of the Administration of Justice Act 1960, by way of an application on notice by form C66.

Some of the underlying family proceedings had been concluded for quite some time. The judge observed that in such cases, the children were unlikely to have a guardian acting for them, but that it was important to hear from the children. He noted conflicting interests: dragging them back into litigation “might in itself be harmful to them and might expose them to more parental conflict or to a risk of parental manipulation”, but it might also be emotionally harmful for the decisions not to take account of their voices. Poole J decided that he needed to hear the views of those children old enough and with sufficient maturity to express their views, while recognising that others may take a different view in other cases. The children supported or did not oppose it.

The judge observed that while there is a procedure to bring such applications, it would be helpful to have guidance or a more streamlined procedure for applications which fell outside the regime in FPR PD12R (governing Transparency Orders) [J152].
In terms of the substantive decision, there was a sharp distinction between, on the one hand, the permission given to the journalist to access to the entire Cafcass and psychological reports and, on the other, the limited permission granted in respect to what she was permitted to publish.

Poole J accepted that there was a significant public interest in understanding how allegations of alienating behaviour have been addressed in the Family Court, including the role of expert evidence in relation to that issue [J73-75]. However, he rejected the submission on Ms Bradley’s behalf that this public interest and her Art 10 rights could only be served by giving her unfettered access to the documents and permission to quote from them as she wished [J83].

He also rejected the applicant’s argument based on the contention that Dr Downs had “pedalled a pseudo-scientific diagnosis of a syndrome”. The judge had read the relevant expert reports and that was not correct. Dr. Downs had not used the term “parental alienation syndrome” in her reports in the four cases. He further observed that investigations of allegations of alienating behaviours by a parent, with the assistance of expert evidence, is the proper function of the Family Court [J80-81].
Finally, while Poole J accepted the (uncontentious) submission that it was not for the court to take a view on what a journalist may publish or their editorial line, he observed. “I understand Dr Downs’ protest that she has been misrepresented in The Tribune article, but that is not a ground for depriving Ms Bradley of permission to see and publish from documents. Indeed, misapprehension about Dr Downs having diagnosed parental alienation syndrome strengthens the case for providing [the applicant] with the evidence in order to improve her understanding” [J82].