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.
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@HMCTSgovuk 2. It's bizarre and counter-productive for a court that is very committed to open justice (and - whatever its failings - delivers on it better than most other parts of the justice system) to put out the message that half of its hearings are "PRIVATE".
3. More than half of the hearings in the COP listing on CourtServe today say hearings are "PRIVATE".
Only one (as far as I can tell) would actually exclude observers - because it's a Dispute Resolution Hearing.
Observers are not being deliberately excluded from the others.
A thread about listings in the "private" Court of Protection
This week some would-be observers contacted me to say the COP hearings in their regional court were all being held "in private" so they couldn't observe them.
How could they find some "public" ones?
Many COP hearings (sometimes *most* of them) are listed as "in private" and "not open to public".
I know the court doesn't mean to say we can't observe them, but most people don't know that. Why should they?
It's a huge obstacle to open justice to list hearings as "private".
Listing COP hearings as "private" is very common.
Do you want to guess how many of the 23 hearings listed in CourtServe for tomorrow (16th May 2022) are listed as "private".
Hayden J is proposing hearing the case now - both counsel want to adjourn. "For a multitude of reasons" says Debra Powell QC (for the OS). She'll present reasons why capacity decision shouldn't be made now after lunch break. Restarting 1.40pm.
Referring to 1(3) MCA 2005, Hayden comments "it's possible to overcook- Is all this NECESSARY to decide capacity?"
Counsel responds sharply "In my respectful submission My Lord, oral evidence from a consultant psychiatrist who has recently assessed her capacity is NECESSARY"
P was quoted by P as saying that she wants a vaginal delivery - and if she has to have a caesarean she wants it with a epidural and her partner present. Her least favoured birth option is a caesarean under general anaesthetic (which is what I think the Trust has applied for)
Hearing before Hayden J just starting. As public observers we have to be flexible - judges are hearing multiple cases and timing is a challenge. #NotSecretCourt
Another challenging case of a pregnant woman with schizophrenia and doctors requesting c-section, although she said some weeks ago, when she had capacity, that she'd prefer a vaginal delivery. #NotSecretCourt