Proposed changes relating to court bundles in family proceedings
Resolution has responded to proposed changes to PD27A.
Resolution has responded to proposed changes to PD27A. Practice Direction 27A supplementing the Family Procedure Rules 2010.
This response was prepared by Resolution’s Children, Legal Aid, Litigants in Person and Pensions, Tax and Financial Remedies Committees. View our response in full.
Resolution has concerns about the proposal that only those documents relevant to the hearing are to be included for each hearing in children cases. This plays havoc with the pagination which changes each time and if you have started making advocate notes/annotations/a chronology, you don’t want the page numbers to change. In addition, it creates more preparation work and cost to the person preparing the bundle as it means that each hearing requires a new bundle rather than building on the last bundle.
Local authority legal representatives tell us that they agree that starting a new bundle each time is going to cause excessive and unnecessary work. And that changing pagination is going to cause difficulties, for example, threshold documents now require page reference numbers to be Re A compliant. Advocates and judges are used to being able to identify the most up to date documents quickly and its helpful to have previous orders and statements to refer to in the bundle when needed. The judge will have a reading list so this seems to be making more unnecessary work and difficulties.
There are already complications with managing multiple and extra bundles in care cases when separate redacted bundles are needed, for example, where there are two fathers, or intervenors. The logistics and complications of having to redo all these bundles for every hearing would be unmanageable and risky. We also suggest that there should be consideration of having more than one bundle, for example, in a public law injury case, there should be one bundle with the main documents in it and separate ‘source’ bundle(s) for medical notes/records, contact notes and foster care logs. In this way the main bundle does not get too large to send by email or download etc and is more manageable.
Resolution,
October 2024