Thread by @KitzingerCelia

🧵

Another thread about hidden hearings.

Because there are still so many.

Court of Protection listings are still a long way from supporting the judiciary's aspirations for transparency in the #NotSecretCourt

2. I don't doubt the judiciary's commitment to open justice and transparency - and I believe it is shared by most Court of Protection judges and lawyers, and understood by most court staff.

And yet....

3. There should be a single list of all county court Court of Protection hearings in one place - under the "Court of Protection" heading in CourtServe.

@HMCTSgovuk 4. Here's the Court of Protection list of hearings for 23rd May 2022. All the county court hearings in the Court of Protection should be here, listed alphabetically, easy for us members of the public to access.

5. We should be able to click on any heading in this list and find all the hearings listed in that court, with info about date, time, duration and issues before the court (the latter is missing here in this entry from Birmingham).

This list should be comprehensive.

6. Sometimes there's more than one COP hearing in a given court - and when that happens ALL of them should be included

It's clunky to have 2 entries here for the 3 Leicester hearings, but at least they've included all 3

(Turns out there are 2 more. We'll come to that later).

7. The problem for open justice is that very often hearings are NOT listed in the Court of Protection list.

We call these "hidden" hearings.

So for 23rd May 2022, there are 34 hearings in this list.

And another 11 COP hearings not in this list - hidden elsewhon CourtServe.

8. I don't often go systematically through the whole content of county court lists for CourtServe looking for hidden Court of Protection hearings because it's so time-consuming (+ boring), but I did today.

It took 2.5 hours. I found 11 hidden hearings

Like these in Guildford.

9. This Court of Protection hearing in Leeds should have been in the Court of Protection list. Instead I found it hidden in the Family Court listing for Leeds county court.

10. Court of Protection hearings in Swindon are listed only in the Swindon Daily Cause list

I had to scroll through 32 other hearings in Swindon to find them - hearings involving the Bank of Scotland, Zenith Insurance, Dept of Transport.

They should have been in the COP list.

11. There are puzzling inconsistencies between hearings listed in the Court of Protection list and in the county court list. Like these two entries for Nottingham hearings.

12. There's a 10am hearing in Leicester before DJ Mason in the list for Leicester county court that doesn't appear in the Court of Protection list (even though the COP list *does* include the 12.00 and 3.00 hearings before DJ Mason). Why?

13. There's another hidden COP hearing in Leicester before DJ Birk that you only find if you go to the "Leicester" tab, then "Daily DJs" and then scroll down to the 4th judge and 18th hearing, after hearings involving Asda and Anglian Water Services.

14. This could be a hidden hearing in Swansea at 10am, with a different hearing at 10.30am with an uncannily similar (but different) case number.

Like so many others, it/they is/are "private" (or "restricted") and there's incorrect contact info for would-be observers.

15. I know this level of detail about something as mundane as court lists is BORING.

I think it's tedious too.

But there's a fundamental principle at stake.

But if we don't know court hearings are happening, because they're hidden, there's no transparency in the COP.

16. I first blogged about hidden hearings back in August 2020. I described the situation as "a bit of a nightmare" for would-be observers looking for hearings outside of the RCJ or FAH. Blog is here: openjusticecourtofprotection.org/2020/08/17/how…

17. Nobody in COP or @HMCTSgovuk did anything in response to my blog of August 2020.

I didn't really expect anything to change.

But then in February 2022 there was a key hearing before a senior judge about controlling + coercive behaviour.

Hidden (in Swansea).

Time to act!

18. I was dismayed that this important 'fact-finding' hearing on coercive + controlling behaviour had been hidden

(Judgment is published as MB v PB & Ors [2022] EWCOP 14)

So I did a systematic search of CourtServe listings on 28th February 2022 + found 1/3 COP hearings hidden.

19. I published my findings on Twitter both on 28th February 2022 and then again on 2nd March 2022.

At least a third of all COP hearings were NOT in the Court of Protection list.

They were hidden elsewhere in CourtServe.

@HMCTSgovuk 20. Same thing on 14th March 2022, when I did another systematic search and found over a third of Court of Protection hearings were not in the Court of Protection list.

It's not the ONLY listing problem (I highlighted 4 others) but it's a significant one for open justice.

21. On 23rd May 2022, around a quarter of Court of Protection hearings are not in the Court of Protection list. (I'm not getting too excited - yet - that this might represent an improvement over previous counts).

I've sent slides to @HMCTSgovuk + they are now trying to fix it.

@HMCTSgovuk 22. I'm (finally) now optimistic that senior people are taking it seriously and that there might be change in the future

I'll do another systematic search in about a month and hope to be able to report that COP hearings are no longer hidden

It's so important for open justice.