Bundle of Joy: New Practice Direction on Bundles, Position Statements etc., Effective 2 March 2026

If you’re the sort of lawyer who keeps old editions of the Red Book (etc.) in neat chronological order on your shelves – and let’s be honest, who isn’t – you’ll have noticed how they’ve got thicker as the years have gone by.

Back in the prehistoric (pre-White) era, the procedural rules applicable to ancillary relief, contained in the Family Proceedings Rules 1991, were few in number and very short. Since the implementation of the Family Procedure Rules 2010, the pendulum has swung forcefully in the other direction, whereby financial remedies is now covered by a series of extremely detailed rules, practice directions, Efficiency Statements, President’s Memoranda and Guidance, Good Practice Protocols, National FRC Guidance and Local Guidance.

This is no bad thing. Speaking as a dinosaur, it used to be very annoying to go to court without knowing what the other party’s case would be. In the absence of any clear procedural rules or direction, an ‘anything goes’ approach developed in family law, which often amounted to litigation by ambush. Exchange of position statements, often containing new proposals and/or new evidence, took place at court, typically less than an hour before the hearing (including final hearings) began, leading to the frantic taking of instructions and general disarray. Compared to hard-boiled civil litigators, who had weeks to plead and defend their cases, this was all a bit Wild West.

The institution of clear rules, particularly in relation to bundles and position statements, has raised professional standards. The harmonisation of family and civil litigation in terms of the FPR being based on the CPR has been beneficial in improving case management. However, there is now an awful lot of material to absorb, if one wants to keep up to date with practice guidance and avoid judicial criticism.^[1]

Which leads me to the unexcitingly titled but important:

Practice Guidance Update No. 6 of 2025, which over 29 pages contains amendments to a range of existing FPR practice directions. The most significant involves a comprehensive re-writing of PD 27A (from page 10/29) which started life as the ‘Bundles Direction’ and was last substantively updated on 23 July 2018.

The ‘new PD 27A’ comes into effect on 2 March 2026. Confusingly, the Gov.UK website has already been updated whereby it contains a practice direction which (at the time of writing this blog) won’t be in force for another 4 months.

What do you need to know?

1. Structure and length

The new PD 27A is roughly twice as long as its predecessor (6,800 words compared to 3,550). Such is life, one might say: the inevitability of tax, death and legal guidance becoming exponentially longer.

However, there is a specific reason for this additional length: the new PD 27A helpfully separates out provisions relating to financial remedies (Chapter 6 ‘§6’) from other cases such as private law and public law children disputes (Chapter 7 (‘§7’). Financial remedies and public law children are not natural bedfellows at the best of times and require differently constituted bundles. The other provisions at Chapters 1–5 and 8 onwards are of general application, to all cases before the family court or Family Division.

2. E-bundles and paper bundles

The new PD 27A incorporates at Chapter 4 provisions about e-bundles which previously were to be found in the 2021 guidance on e-Bundles, to the effect that ‘except where the court considers there to be exceptional circumstances’ there should be an e-bundle (§4.4).

However, a paper bundle should also be prepared ‘where there is a realistic possibility of a witness giving evidence in person in the court’ or where the court so directs (§4.3). Specific rules for numbering of bundles in FR cases can be found at §6.2 including, importantly, that ‘the page numbering of an e-bundle must match the PDF numbering’ (§6.2d)

The rules committee presumably includes at least one member who is more than comfortable with the technicalities of PDFs since §11.2 contains detailed provisions relating to requirement for OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and orientation of documents so that they can be read from left to right. Rules about the uploading of bundles is set out at §14.2.

3. Content of bundles

The existing rules about what should be included in or excluded from the contents of a bundle have been updated at §5.2 to provide that ‘unless the court directs otherwise’ the bundle should not include:

‘(a) correspondence (including letters of instruction to experts) and correspondence between legal representatives;
 
(b) copies of emails, text messages, WhatsApp messages or any form of social media communications
 
(c) voice notes or other recordings; …
 
(g) photographs’

In financial remedy cases (i.e. under Chapter 6) the ‘preliminary documents’ section of the bundle should now include the FM5 Form (§6.6).

Interestingly, a trial template is now required where the hearing has been listed ‘for two hours or more’ (§6.6g), which must ‘allow a reasonable and realistic time for judicial reading and judgment writing’ (§6.6g(i)). This provision will accordingly capture interim hearings such as LSPO and MPS where the hearing has been listed with a 2 hour time estimate or longer.

4. Position statements

Advocates will note with particular interest the provisions relating to position statements, which has been adopted as the term to cover ‘any form of written submission by a party, or their advocate, including a skeleton argument’ (§6.6). (This lays to rest an issue about the proper name for written submissions – see my 2020 blog about Skeletons, Positions Statements and Notes.)

The new PD 27A incorporates several provisions of the Statement on the Efficient Conduct of Financial Remedy Proceedings… Below High Court Level, e.g. §6.11(a) to (f) adopts §24-27 from the Efficient Conduct document, in relation to the length of position statements, which should be ‘concise’ and not exceed a limit, ranging from 6 for a First Appointment to 15 for a final hearing (although notably this is in addition to a case summary of 6 pages (§8.1))

The ‘verboten’ list of what a position statement shouldn’t include, has been expanded from the Efficient Conduct statement, whereby at §6.12:

’positions statements should …
 
[g] not introduce any new factual allegations or evidence;
 
[h] not include any exhibits;
 
[i] set out the directions or orders sought; and
 
[j] where applicable, include information to inform the court of the parties’ compliance with the duty to negotiate openly and reasonably; and the parties’ views on using non-court dispute resolution as a means of resolving the matters in dispute.’

In my view, §6.11(g) is particularly important. It has long been an issue in financial remedy work (and family cases generally) that the distinction between written submissions and witness evidence is blurred – whereby counsel purport to give evidence by proxy. However, against that, it is often helpful at an FDR to have a factual response set out in writing – given the lack of opportunity for a party to state their case (e.g. in relation to housing) post-Form E and replies, but before s 25 witness statements.

This also raises the issue of duplication. Now that swathes of the Efficiency Conduct have been incorporated into – and extended by – the new PD 27A, it presumably follows that we should follow the wording of PD 27A instead of earlier guidance. While detailed guidance is helpful, there is now so much of it, in an array of different sources, that problems can arise where this overlaps. In an ideal world, a modern Justinian would codify all of this practice guidance into a single source.

5. Use of previous position statements

There is an interesting prohibition on the lodging of previous position statements with an added update. §6.14 provides as follows:

‘A position statement must be prepared for each hearing. It is not appropriate to use a position statement from one hearing, with an added “update” section, for a subsequent hearing.’

§6.12e even precludes the inclusion of ‘material from previous position statements’. However, it isn’t entirely clear – at least to me – why this practice is necessarily unacceptable. While it may be lazy and unhelpful to have relied on an earlier position statement, is this necessarily bad practice in a complex case where the matter has come to court for a mention, or on a discrete application (e.g. in relation to expert evidence) or where new counsel has come into the case at short notice in relation to a side issue? There seems to be limited benefit in those circumstances to reinventing the wheel and re-writing a lengthy note, as opposed to preparing a short update relevant to the new hearing.

6. Citation of authority

This has been updated to include reference not only to the existing Practice Direction (Citation of Authorities) [2001] 1 WLR 1001, to Practice Direction (Citation of Authorities) [2012] 1 WLR 780 but also the more recent Guidance on Citation of Authorities: Judgments of Circuit Judges and District Judges issued by a judge other than a judge of High Court judge level (§10.3)

7. Timetable for lodging

This has been extended, whereby, presumptively, the contents of a bundle must be agreed 7 working days before the hearing (previously 4) and lodged 5 working days in advance (previously 2) with the exception of preliminary documents and position statements which should be filed by 11 am on the eve of the hearing (see §13.2). As with several aspects of this procedural update, one awaits to see what difference this will have in practice.

8. Semantics and definitions

At the risk of delving into academic points, it is notable that the new PD 27A uses the terms ‘financial remedy proceedings’ and ‘proceedings for a financial remedy’ interchangeably. Neither is defined at §1.2,^[2] presumably because the rules committee intended to adopt the wide definition of ‘financial remedy’ at FPR 2.2..

However, this leaves room for some confusing anomalies, e.g. an application for financial relief under Schedule 1 of the Children Act is categorised as a ‘financial remedy’ (FPR 2.2), presumably also in relation to bundles, but it falls outside the definition of ’financial remedy proceedings’ when it comes to costs (FPR 28.3(4)(b)) and, with respect to expert evidence, is classified as ’children proceedings’ (FPR PD 25C §1.2). This is not meant as a criticism of the rules committee but to observe that the taxonomy of the Family Court remains confused – how this can be anything other than baffling to non-lawyers.

Alexander Chandler KC
3 December 2025