27 Aug 2024
27 Aug 2024
If you read the tabloid newspapers, you may be aware of the recent tribulations of England and Manchester City footballer, Kyle Walker. These culminated recently in a two-day final hearing in the Central Family Court, in respect of which the unusual decision was made that the Judgment and the names of the parties and children could be made public.
For those who may not be familiar with the background, Mr Walker has four children by his long-term partner (and now wife) Annie Kilner. In around 2019 Mr Walker had a sexual relationship with Lauryn Goodman though which resulted in the birth of a child, Kairo, in April of 2020. Notwithstanding this, Mr Walker remained in a relationship with Ms Kilner and in fact they were married in November 2021.
Shortly after Kairo’s birth, Miss Goodman made an application to the Court under Schedule 1 of the Children Act 1989 for financial provision for Kairo. Those proceedings were finally resolved in November of 2022. Part of the award was provision of a housing fund of £1.35m for her to buy somewhere to live with Kairo, or £1.85m if the house was within a sixty-mile radius of a particular town in Sussex (Miss Goodman having threatened to buy a house within a stone’s throw of the house Mr Walker shared with Ms Kilner in Cheshire).
However clearly Mr Walker was not put off by Miss Goodman’s litigiousness and before the terms of that Order were implemented, she had fallen pregnant with Mr Walker’s second child, Kinara, who was born in June 2023. When Kinara was just two days old Miss Goodman issued a second application to the Court under Schedule 1 of the Children Act 1989 for financial provision for Kinara.
As Mr Walker and Miss Goodman were not married, her claim for financial provision was brought under Schedule 1 of the Children Act 1989. Schedule 1 of the Children Act 1989 provides the Family Court with the power to make certain financial orders for the benefit of a child. In a Schedule 1 case the Court can Order child maintenance in circumstances where the Child Maintenance Service does not have jurisdiction or, as in this case, where the payer’s income exceeds the upper limit for assessment by the Child Maintenance Service.
In Schedule 1 cases the court can also order the payment of lump sums to cover certain one-off capital expenditure for the benefit of the child and the provision of a home for the other parent to live in with the child. It is important to note though that any home provided pursuant to Schedule 1 would almost always revert to the paying parent on the child completing full-time education.
In the second set of proceedings, Miss Goodman was seeking an increase in the level of child maintenance from the £9,188 per month Mr Walker was paying for one child to £14,750 per month for the two (Mr Walker had offered to increase payments voluntarily to £12,500), she was also, amongst other things, seeking a lump sum of £33,000 to install air conditioning at her home and £31,200 to install an astroturf football playing area. Miss Goodman asserted that by kicking a ball with her left foot from a crawling position, Kinara had shown a talent which may suggest a future career as a professional footballer.
Throughout 2023 Mr Walker tried to keep Kinara’s paternity a secret from his wife and in his attempts to persuade Miss Goodman to keep the secret, he gave in too many financial demands made by her, including purchasing a house for £2.4m rather than the £1.85m as previously ordered. Notwithstanding these many financial offerings, Miss Goodman did not keep Kinara’s paternity a secret, and in December 2023, she sent a text message to Mr Walker’s wife informing her that Mr Walker was Kinara’s father.
On deciding any Schedule 1 case the Court is concerned with the income, earning capacity, property and other financial resources which each party has, or is likely to have in the foreseeable future; the financial needs, obligations and responsibilities which each party has, or is likely to have in the foreseeable future; the financial needs of the child; the income, earning capacity, property and any other financial resources of the child; any physical or mental disability of the child; or the manner in which the child was being, or was expected to be, educated or trained.
This case is unusual due to the exceptional level of wealth and earning power Mr Walker possessed as a result of his job as a professional footballer at the highest level. To provide some financial context to the sums being claimed, at the date of the final hearing, Mr Walker had capital totalling almost £27m and a gross income of £7m to £10m per annum. Conversely Miss Goodman had capital of just £10,877 and only a modest income from her work as an Influencer.
In this case, much of the work had been done by the Judge in the previous proceedings in relation to Kairo, and this hearing was really about considering whether Miss Goodman’s new demands should be acceded to, and the answer was for the most part ‘no’. The Judge was not persuaded that air conditioning in England was a necessity, nor that Kinara, who had just turned one, required an astroturf football pitch at a cost of £31,200. In reaching his decision the Judge gave a glowing assessment of Mr Walker who he described as sensible, honest and reliable. Conversely, of Miss Goodman the Judge concluded that she was not reliable and that she said what she thought would help her case rather than what was true.
Whilst the facts of this case are unusual it is important to note that Schedule 1 claims are by no means limited to the wealthy and just because a parent is not married, they should not feel that they cannot make claims against the other parent to secure the financial position of their children.
The significance of this case is more in the fact that it was allowed to be reported in the press. In Family Proceedings reported cases are usually anonymised with parties and children being ascribed initials unrelated to their actual names. However, due to the level of interest in Mr Walker and Miss Goodman, at the outset of the Final Hearing in this case, there was a request from three journalists, one from the Daily Mail, one from The Sun and one from the Press Association, to attend the Final hearing. The Judge permitted the journalists to attend the hearing and made an interim transparency order pending the making of a final decision at the end of the hearing.
Miss Goodman was opposed to the press being permitted to publish details of the Judgement whereas Mr Walker was not. The Judge did not pull any punches when assessing the justification of the mother’s objections, commenting “it sits ill for a person to come to Court arguing for privacy for her children when, just a very short while earlier, she took a payment from the press to visit the European Football Championships with her son dressed in an England football shirt with the name “Daddy” on the back, and to be willingly photographed doing this to provide journalistic fodder which the newspapers were only too happy to use”.
The Judge concluded that the right of the press to scrutinise and comment on the Court’s procedures and decisions, and what the mother has requested of the father and how he has responded, on this occasion were a greater priority than the need to protect the privacy of the parties and the children. As such, subject to removing any reference to the parties’ addresses other than the counties in which they lived, the details of the case were allowed to be published in full.
