Held, reporting restrictions varied. It was a canonical principle that the identification of children who were the subject of family proceedings was seriously contrary to their interests and was to be avoided as all costs. Therefore, any report of those proceedings was to be anonymised and that anonymisation might well be extended to anyone involved in the case the revelation of whose identity could materially increase the risk of the identification of the subject child. That “special reason” aside, the question of anonymisation of the professionals involved in the case was to be decided by reference to the normal rules for derogating from the principle of open justice (and no anonymisation) as set out in the established authorities. Accordingly, when anonymisation of a professional was proposed the court ought to ask whether, taking into account that freedom to report the professional’s identity was the usual rule, and was a strong one which could only be displaced by unusual or exceptional circumstances, the requisite intensely focused weighing of the importance of freedom of expression by the press and the professional’s right to a private life (under the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms as enacted into domestic law) led the court to displace that ordinary rule and to conclude that the request for anonymisation ought to be granted to secure the proper administration of justice and to protect thee professional’s interests. Outside of the special reason, an award of anonymity required a demanding test to be met and, essentially, one of two things had to be shown: either that revelation of the identity of the person in question would result in them facing a high probability of really serious physical or psychological harm (including the shame, humiliation and stress of being systematically “trolled”), or that the future prevention of crime would be compromised. While the required intense focus on the comparative importance of the specific rights being claimed in the individual case did not require each professional in a case to be considered individually and separately, it was equally inconceivable that generic classes, such as all social workers or all clinicians, could be said in all cases to have an eclipsing right to privacy with the corollary of routine anonymisation. The authorities made clear that an application for anonymisation of a group of professionals involved in a particular case was to turn on its own facts in accordance with the established balancing exercise. In the present case, where no application for anonymisation had been made other than under the special reason, and where it would not increase the probability of the young person being identified were the NHS trust and the local authority to be named, the reporting restrictions order was to be varied accordingly (paras 29, 31–32, 37, 39–42, 44, 63–65).

Per curiam. (i) The formal test on an anonymisation application set out in CPR r 39.2(4), namely, that anonymisation of a person should to be ordered only if the court considered non-disclosure necessary to secure the proper administration of justice and in order to protect the interests of that person, is, for unknown reasons, only formally applied in family proceedings to those cases which all members of the public may observe (see FPR r 7.30(5) and r 37.8) and not to those cases which only some members of the public, namely journalists and bloggers, may observe (see FPR r 27.11). This must be an oversight. It is obvious that this formal test should be treated as applying where anonymisation is sought in any type of family proceeding (paras 35, 36).

(ii) Comments on the undesirable, and potentially unlawful, practice of the Financial Remedies Court in routinely anonymising judgments in cases where there is no question of section 12 of the Administration of Justice Act 1960 applying and where the gravity of the facts is nowhere near the level where anonymity has been awarded in the civil sphere, despite there being no “entitlement” to privacy on the part of litigants in that court (paras 49–62).