Legislation intended to open up the family courts is a ‘lost opportunity’ that will fail to bring about the openness needed to improve confidence in family proceedings, a leading judge has said.

Giving the 2010 Hershman-Levy memorial lecture last week, Lord Justice Munby called for ‘radical and comprehensive reform’ of the rules relating to transparency of the courts.

Munby said the recently enacted Children, Schools and Families Act 2010 was not sufficiently comprehensive, because areas such as divorce and ancillary relief were ‘scarcely affected’.

He said that while the act achieved a greater degree of consistency in terms of what matters could be reported, this was at the ‘heavy price’ of an increase in the areas covered by reporting restrictions for the first time.

The Court of Appeal judge, who is chairman of the Law Commission but was speaking in a personal capacity, added that it was ‘far from obvious that the supposed relaxation of the reporting restrictions in children cases – surely the crux of the problem – will actually have the desired effects, if indeed any effect at all’.

Munby said that the act was likely to reduce rather than increase the amount of information about children and other family proceedings that finds its way into the public domain, and this was ‘truly a missed opportunity’.

He added that overly restrictive privacy rules made it too easy for the family justice system to be attacked, which had led to a lack of public confidence.

Munby said there must be a ‘radical and comprehensive reform’ embracing all types of cases dealt with by the family courts. He said the existing ‘muddled’ system must be replaced with ‘principled’ and ‘consistent’ rules that are ‘cheaper to operate’, and these must be arrived at ‘by a transparent process involving appropriate public debate’.

The judge said that steps must ‘urgently’ be taken to ensure that more judgments, including more routine cases, should be published in an appropriately anonymised form.

Munby also added that there must be more provision of information for those affected by family court decisions. He said that as a minimum requirement, every substantive judgment in a care case dealing with either fact-finding or final disposal should be transcribed so that, for example, a child who has been adopted can later find out why a judge made the decision that their parents could not adequately look after them.