Category Archives: assessment of risk

Section 37 reports are not a vehicle into which to pour professional angst

Posted on December 23, 2013 by suesspiciousminds

The High Court decision in Re M (Children) 2013, and the strong judicial comments about the need for section 7 and s37 reports to properly analyse the issues, AND a warning for Local Authorities who try to avoid responsibility for children in designated authority disputes. Important guidance for both LA lawyers and social workers within this.

http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Fam/2013/3758.html

 

The facts of this case are quite extreme and unusual. They involve children who were living with their maternal grandparents. These grandparents had had themselves four children – the mother (who had been unable to care for the children), AM (who had been sexually abused by a man 20 years older than her during her adolescence) and twin boys. The twin boys celebrated their 18th birthday by murdering another grandparent and were convicted and imprisoned.

 

Those twins were subsequently released from prison and there was some suggestion that they might move in with the grandparents and the four children in question.

 

Somehow (it is not clear from the judgment) the case came before the Court and section 7 reports and then a s37 report was commissioned from the Local Authority.

(Non-lawyer note – a section 7 report is one the Court ask for to advise on where the child should live and what contact they should be having, and a section 37 report is one the Court ask for to advise on whether the children are suffering significant harm and if so whether the Local Authority propose to do anything about it)

 

This being a London case, there was a degree of dispute as to which Local Authority was responsible, there being three possible candidates. Anecdotally, I think whilst two warring LA’s can eventually come to terms, it is nigh on impossible for three to reach an accord. (The best you get is that Trumptonshire and Chigley both gang up and agree between themselves that this is a Camblewick Green case, and hope that poor Camblewick Green buckle under pressure) 

In this case, it seems that six months were spent quarelling about that, with in the meantime, no LA actually taking the lead in protecting these children or assessing the obvious risk. The Judge wasn’t very impressed about this, and any LA lawyer needs to be aware of the scathing remark at the end (underlining mine)

 

Against this backdrop, it is, to say the least, profoundly depressing that the Social Services’ response appears to have been, at best, minimal. For months three local authorities – Hackney, Enfield and Haringey – jostled amongst themselves as to who had responsibility to lead child protective measures. It follows that without a lead there can scarcely be focus. Quite how significant that failure was will become clear when I come to determine the disputed allegations in this case. By my calculation, at least six months were lost on this issue. I can see there are many reasons why Local Authorities in this climate might wish to avoid the burden of responsibility for a case like this. It inevitably absorbs already stretched resources, both financial and in terms of personnel. I have not permitted court time to be deflected into an investigation as to whether any particular Authority was acting unreasonably or was wrong in law. There have been too many other pressing issues in this case directly concerned with the welfare of the children now that need to be considered as a priority. I do not therefore condemn any one of those Local Authorities, but I do send this signal: that if Local Authorities seek to evade responsibility for child protection to avoid costs, they are likely to face liability in negligence, administrative law and under human rights legislation. As the family courts embrace the opportunities and advantages that greater transparency may bring, Local Authorities who behave in that way will not be able to avail themselves of the cloak of anonymity under which, in the past, they might have found refuge.

 

 

Having settled on which LA was to do the work, the reports themselves came under some scrutiny

  1. Many of the issues that I have just set out were known to the authors of these reports. They concluded, however, that the children should remain with their grandparents. Quoting from the second of the two reports, which I take to have been prepared sometime in early May or late April 2012 (for, like so many other documents presented in this case, it is undated) the author concludes as follows:

“There are some issues arising from recent interventions in both psychiatry, probation and social services in relation to how disturbed the grandparents’ own children, RM, S and SM present as. These adults have made significant allegations in relation to the treatment that they received at the hands of their parents and parents’ friends. It should also be noted, however, that these three children suffer from significant personality disorders and this fact will have a significant bearing on the reliability of the allegations. However, the allegations remain concerning and will need further assessment.”

The report continues:

It would be the Local Authority’s opinion, however, that at this juncture there is no evidence indicating that this placement should discontinue. Therefore the children should remain in the care of the grandparents.”

Earlier in the report the authors observed that the children appeared to be happy, secure and settled in the placement.

 

 

If you are thinking, that seems a bit skimpy, given the wide range of issues already outlined in this brief summary, you are not alone  (again, underlining mine)

 

 

  1. The Guardian has condemned the analysis in this report as superficial. But, in my view, the real flaw is that there is an absence of analysis altogether. The language is telling. It refers vaguely to “some issues”, “significant allegations”, the ubiquitous “concerns”. These are gateways to analysis, they are not, in and of themselves, analysis, and they are certainly not conclusions. Section 37 reports are prepared for courts in order that they can consider risk and what, if any, intervention is required under the available legal framework. They are not discussion documents or a vehicle in which to pour professional angst. Issues must not only be identified or raised, they must be thought through, evaluated and placed in the wider context as it is assessed at the time. Simple report is rarely valuable; it must be challenged, and an expressed willingness to participate must be measured against evidence of past participation. In other words, at the interim stage the full panoply of risk assessment has to be deployed. Absent these conventional tools any risk assessment is of limited value, perhaps meaningless.
  1. What does one draw in the context of these “concerns” from the observation that “the children appeared happy”, when the report itself refers to killings, sexual abuse, rape and incest? The report includes the following:

“On 23rd January 2012 a legal planning meeting was held to establish whether threshold was met to go into proceedings. We were advised that at present there was not enough evidence for threshold to be met to instigate proceedings to remove the children from the maternal grandparents’ care.”

That the threshold criteria on an interim basis were met is so obvious that it is redundant of any sensible argument. As to the proportionality of a removal, that is a wholly different question. It can hardly have helped sensible decision making that it was conflated into one test.

 

 

Given the facts of this case, the Court was clearly of the view that the threshold criteria were made out, and was unhappy that the s37 report  (and probably from the remarks in para 14 above the legal planning meeting) had blurred the issue of “is the threshold met?”  with “is an application for removal likely to succeed”

 

  1. Ms. Briggs, on behalf of the Local Authority, has spent much energy in her written closing submissions and indeed in her oral submissions addressing this point. Her essential argument is that the children remained with their grandparents until sufficient evidence emerged to establish what she referred to as the high test for interim removal. This, I am afraid, will not do. The fact is that the Local Authority failed to analyse the evidence that was already available to it. Ms. Briggs talks of the need for ‘close scrutiny of all historical facts’; the need for ‘primary material’; for a ‘definitive history from source material’. The court, she submits, must be persuaded that the child’s welfare demands immediate separation. But section 38(2) is an interim protective measure. Of course the best possible evidence is required, both to establish it and the proportionality of intervention, guided by the section 1(3) criteria. It is the two in combination that point to what the child’s best interests require, or even, to adopt Ms. Briggs’ term (itself gleaned from the authorities) ‘demand’. Evaluation of risk requires balancing the two seperate sections: the reasonable grounds for believing that the children had sustained significant harm within the definition of section 31(2) of the Children Act 1989, analysed within the welfare checklist criteria, to evaluate whether or how best a child can be protected until such point as the evidence is fully marshalled and, if necessary, put to the assay in cross-examination. Ms. Briggs put the test too high. She does so, in my belief, in a brave attempt to justify ex post facto the Local Authority’s actions.
  1. In the authority which she relies on, and cites to me, Re GR [2010] EWCA Civ 871, it is absolutely plain that Black LJ is precisely prescribing the process which I have just outlined. She says at para.41:

“The most recent case to which I would refer is Re B and KB [2009] EWCA Civ 1254 in which the appeal was against the dismissal of the local authority’s application for an interim care order. The trial judge had given himself what was described as an ‘immaculate self-direction’ in these terms:

‘whether the continued removal of KB from the care of her parents is proportionate to the risk of harm to which she will be exposed if she is allowed to return to her parents’ care.’

However, Wall LJ [as he then was] with whom Thorpe LJ agreed, was persuaded that the judge had failed to go on properly to conduct the required balancing exercise. He said:

’56. Speaking for myself, I find L-A helpful. I agree with the judge that the section 38 criteria were plainly met in relation to both children, but it is equally clear to me that KB’s welfare did demand her immediate removal from her parents’ care and that there was abundant material (not least the views of the police) which warranted that course of action. In my judgment, KB’s safety, using that word in a broad sense to include her psychological welfare, did require interim protection.'”

  1. My criticism of the Local Authority is, that they did not really evaluate the risk to the child at all, and indeed later to any of the children in the public law proceedings at the interim stage. They have, rather, focused on the forensic difficulties of establishing the case. Even if that were a relevant consideration – and, in my view, it is not – then there was, in my analysis, proper material upon which to undertake the exercise.

 

 

 

I think this is a first for me, seeing an advocate representing the LA being criticised for putting the test for removal “too high”. 

 

 Clearly this case presented some significant forensic challenges and the marshalling of all of the evidence and properly testing it would require a lot of painstaking work, but the Judge’s critique here is that the LA did not assess the risk to these children based on the information that they already had.

 

 

  1. The section 7 report to which I referred earlier is dated 11th February 2011. It is signed by Alison Skerritt, the social worker, and countersigned by her deputy team manager, Dina Sturgeon. I quote only from two passages at pp.19 and 22 of that document:

“AMN, RMN and JMM have suffered little harm in their lives, and this is because they have lived with their grandparents who have protected them and kept them safe from harm. However, it would be fair to say that the children would be at greater risk of suffering significant harm if they were removed from their grandparents’ care to reside with their mother or their mother and LM, as SM is struggling to resolve her mental health problems. Furthermore, due to LM’s conviction, the Local Authority would recommend that he only have supervised contact with the children. [Later:] In conclusion for the reasons above outlined, the children are well placed and settled at their grandparents’ home. No concerns have been identified from any of the agencies involved, and the children and reports have in fact been very positive. As all parents are in agreement with the current arrangements for the moment, Mr. and Mrs. M have applied for a residence order to secure the wellbeing of their grandchildren.”

  1. As I work through the evidence in this case, just how superficial the enquiries of the section 37 report and the 7 report were, I believe will become all too evident.

 

 

Later on in the process, the LA took a rather different view of the risks involved, and sought to remove the children and had a care plan of adoption. There was a long list of findings sought, but just looking at the findings that were AGREED is quite illuminating as to how those earlier assessments of risk were perceived by the Court.

 

  1. (1) The mother has a history of mental health problems. She has a diagnosis of emotionally unstable personality disorder which causes her to behave in a volatile and impulsive manner. She has reported hearing voices. Mother has a history of attempting suicide by taking overdoses and self-harming.

(2) Mother has a history of substance misuse problems. Mother reports having misused cannabis, LSD, meth amphetamines and cocaine.

(3) LM has a history of substance misuse problems. He continues to smoke cannabis.

(4) The relationship between mother and LM is volatile and violent. The parents have hit and punched one another.

(5) On 1st March 2012 mother telephoned the police and reported that LM had cut himself and threatened to jump out of their sixth-floor window. When police attended they found LM on the floor with two deep lacerations to his arm which were self-inflicted.

(6) On 20th March 2013 mother telephoned the police and reported that LM had threatened to self-harm following an argument about money.

(7) The maternal family came to the attention of the Local Authority in 1996 when AM was 12 years old, because she had been running away from home.

(8) Several referrals were made when AM was 14. Referrals came from AM’s school, the police and the maternal grandparents. AM was absconding from school, running away from home, and was in a sexual relationship with KH, a man 20 years her senior, who had previously been in a relationship with the maternal grandmother and who claimed to be the father of JM and RM Jnr.

(9) AM was sexually abused by KH from the age of 13. The sexual abuse included penetrative sex. AM was introduced to KH by FH, her paternal grandfather.

(10) AM was memorandum interviewed on 14th January 1999 and confirmed her allegations that KH had raped her.

(11) The maternal grandmother allowed FH to visit the home, help with the gardening and take A out, despite being highly suspicious of him.

(12) In early February 1999 AM took a knife from the kitchen and held her siblings hostage in a bedroom. She said she wanted to harm herself.

(13) AM was placed at Degra House, a specialist residential, unit on 3rd August 1998 at the age of 14. She received intensive psychotherapy for the sexual abuse she suffered. AM presented as suicidal and self-harming during her stay at Degra.

(14) JM and RM Jnr. had behavioural difficulties in adolescence. They truanted from school, were eventually expelled and were sent to a tuition centre. Both boys were referred to an education psychologist.

(15) In 2006 JM and RM Jnr. were convicted of the manslaughter and robbery of AH, AM’s paternal grandmother. It is recorded that they were sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment.

(16) At the time of the twins’ arrest in 2006, a computer was found at the family home with 68 indecent images of children on it. No action was taken by the police regarding these images in light of the charges of murder against the twins. Ms. Briggs has advised me, and it is not contested, that these images were set at Category 4 by the Crown Prosecution Service, which, as I understand it, means that they involve images of penetrative sex with under-age children.

(17) JM and RM Jnr. both have diagnoses of severe personality disorder. They have both reported hearing voices, have expressed suicidal ideation and have self-harmed. They are assessed to present a high risk in the community.

(18) Prior to the twins being released, the maternal grandparents stated that they did not consider that the twins presented a risk to children and they disagreed with the restrictions placed on the twins.

(19) Maternal grandmother provided mother’s telephone number to JM prior to his release from prison. He then sent several texts of a sexual nature to the mother.

(20) The maternal grandparents have said that they believe the mother deliberately engineered RM Jnr’s recall to prison.

(21) In 2006 F was convicted of two counts of sexual activity with a child under 16. The girl concerned was 13 years old. She disclosed that she was asleep and woke up to find F touching her, her bra undone. F [by which is meant LM] was sentenced to two years conditional discharge, and was on the sexual offenders’ register for two years.

  1. Those 21 findings are all agreed facts in this case. In my view, they tell their own story.

 

 

I won’t recount them all here, but in addition to those 21 agreed findings, a further 24 findings were made, including that at the time his daughter was being sexually abused in adolescence by an older man KH,  the grandfather was aware of this and that KH was boasting of it to him

 

  1. 34.   (1) In evidence and cross-examination both maternal grandparents acknowledge that their daughter was indeed sexually abused by KH – a man 20 years older than she was – and that he had been abusing her since she was 13 years of age.

(2) The grandfather agreed that he knew KH had claimed to be in a relationship with a 13-year-old girl when he, KH, was 19. Moreover, the grandfather emphasised that that was something that KH “boasted about” (I use his phrase) and “bragged about” (again his phrase). The grandfather referred to KH in evidence as “a paedophile”, though it was clear that he was not entirely comfortable with that term, and later withdrew from it. He withdrew on the somewhat tortuous basis that KH might merely have been bragging about this relationship or, to put it another way, pretending to be a paedophile when he was in fact not one. In my view a rather ludicrous proposition.

(3) Both grandparents knew that FH was associated with KH, and they accept that he raped their daughter, A.

(4) The grandfather knew, and spent time with, KH, whom he knew, it seems to me, beyond any doubt, to be a paedophile.

 

 

I don’t think it will terribly surprise anyone that the Court came to the conclusion that the grandparents were not safe and that the children had to live elsewhere.

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Untimely ripped part two

Posted on December 3, 2013 by suesspiciousminds

Firstly thank you to all the contributors to the debate on the first post, I think this case undoubtedly stirs up not only emotions but some genuinely important issues. No doubt once we get the Court of Protection judgment (which is the really important one) more issues will be stirred up.

I have to point you all towards Pink Tapes very thoughtful and considered analysis of the case

http://pinktape.co.uk/cases/never-let-the-facts-get-in-the-way-of-a-good-story-eh/#more-4418

which makes the very important point that the Press are conflating two separate decisions and applications

1. The Health authority’s application for a determination about capacity and surgery to the Court of Protection, which would have been about health issues

2. The Local Authority’s application for removal of the child on an interim basis, which would have been about risk  (and appears from the reporting to have taken place in mother’s absence and whilst she was not conscious)

It is the conflation of those two separate decisions and applications into one that suggests that the C-section happened to make it easy for social workers to remove the child that raises the temperature so much.   There are still very interesting and important issues in the case, however, and still a legitimate public debate to be had about whether this is right or not.

It occurred to me that I could imagine all sorts of scenarios where this choice was a genuine life-or-death one for both limbs (it would be wrong for me to speculate about those, but it doesn’t involve much of a stretch to concieve of a situation where it appeared that the only way to save A baby’s life was to take this incredibly harsh action). Now, we don’t know whether that was the case here or not, and await the judgments to give us an informed view.

[So from here on out, I am not talking about THIS particular case, I am talking about a hypothetical case, where the Court is satisfied that there is a genuine life-or-death choice to be made, where the issue is either to save the child OR to intervene in the starkest and harshest way  –  the Court is of course bound by Art 2, so would have no choice BUT to act, if the choice were that stark]

Hypothetically, IF the evidence was that this action was the only thing that could have saved the child’s life and the risks there were ones that no Local Authority could sensibly ignore, one still has to consider whether the State (which in my view effectively ‘borrows’ its powers with the consensus of the people) ought to have those sorts of powers, even after a legal process with safeguards and the highest tests before such powers can be used.

I think that there is a very legitimate question, along the lines of Ben Franklin’s famous aphorism  “Those who would trade in their freedom for their protection deserve neither”

If we as a society, and as a free press take the view that even in a life or death situation, an outcome like this is abhorrent and wrong  (and I think I am probably leaning towards that myself, in terms of ‘are these powers that the State should have’ as opposed to ‘those powers existing, was it right to make use of them?’  but I reserve my final position) then in coming to that judgment, we have to accept the consequences of it, which will be that we must be willing to accept that it might be better for the baby faced with this hypothetical situation to die than to use very draconian powers to secure its safety.

That’s a big question put in those terms.  I have immediately thought of  three conflicting positions in relation to that :-

(a) in a life or death situation, pretty much anything goes to save the baby, although the burden to demonstrate that this really is life or death is high

(b) Even in a life or death situation, the State shouldn’t have such powers and it is wrong to exercise them

(c) I would be absolutely opposed to such powers being used in anything short of life or death, and I still feel pretty uncomfortable about the powers existing, because of the draconian nature of them, the fact that the decision is being made in haste and what appears ‘life and death’ might not be in the cold light of day

[I think that in the hypothetical situation, I am probably C, but I MIGHT be B]

I do feel uncomfortable that a removal hearing takes place whilst mother was unconscious, if the reporting is accurate, and I would want evidence of a very high level that there was really nothing that could be done to safeguard the child whilst a hearing took place with mother being present.

I have little doubt, that IF we had a hypothetical situation like this, and the risks were genuine life or death and this draconian action was the only way to save the baby, and the LA HAD NOT acted, there would be equal criticism and vitriol from the Press about bungling social workers who let a baby die even though they knew how big the risks were  – “what were they thinking?”.  Does anyone honestly think that we wouldn’t have been seeing “heads must roll” headlines and speeches in Parliament? 

So whilst this case is based on a particular set of circumstances which may never ever crop up again, it does raise an issue of wider importance – are we as a society willing to accept that if the system is rebalanced so that we have a higher tolerance of risk to allow more children to stay with their families, are we at the same time willing to accept the less palatable consequences of that?

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What it feels like

Posted on November 28, 2013 by suesspiciousminds

I thought that this was a really excellent piece in Community Care and wanted to share it with my readers  (there’s probably some overlap between people who read this and read Community Care, but not total overlap)

http://www.communitycare.co.uk/2013/11/27/feels-like-child-social-work-teams-caseload-dies/

It is something that we try not to think about, but the potential is there with every phone call, every email, every decision you make, the question you ask or forget to ask.

I know that some of my readers think that all social workers are heartless nazi-fascists  –  too certain, coy and hard to please, who need to be lined up and shot come the Revolution *, and I don’t expect to ever change their mind. We will continue to Agree to Disagree.

Nor do I happen to think that social workers are all harp-playing bewinged ministering angels who descend when fear and anguish wring the brow. 

Like any profession, there are good ones and bad ones  (teachers, doctors, lawyers, pop stars). Everyone will have and is entitled to have their own view on what proportion of good and bad makes up the profession.  

 It happens to be a profession where a bad one can cause a lot of misery, but it is also a profession where those within it have to carry a lot of fear and disquiet about making wrong decisions  (either way – the Always/Never myth is, as I and others have discussed, a myth.  https://suesspiciousminds.com/2013/09/29/alwaysnever/ 

Nobody can get every decision right, every time).  

If we as a society constantly ramp up the pressure and consequences of getting a decision wrong in only one direction (always) we do run the risk of getting too many wrong the other, less criticised way (never) 

 

 

*I’m reminded of the phone call I used to get at 9.15am every Monday without fail in an early job, from a man who would tell me that “come the Revolution, you and people like you will be first up against the wall and shot… no offence to you mate”

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Pure and Simple – the Court of Appeal attack hearsay

Posted on November 14, 2013 by suesspiciousminds

 

 

To clarify, the Court of Appeal did not attack the manufactured flash-in-the-pan pop sensation that was Hear’say, who deserve it merely for the superfluous apostrophe.  

[In their defence, the band produced not only Kym Marsh who has been ace in Corrie, Myleene Klass who was top viewing on I’m a Celebrity, but also their reject pile produced Jessica from Liberty X, a major factor in keeping Kevin Pieterson happy and in good shape to thrash the Aussies at cricket in the upcoming Ashes series]

 

No, this is really about  Re W (Fact Finding : Hearsay) 2013, and hooray for a meaningful title AND a Court of Appeal case that is not about bloody placement orders.

 http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2013/1374.html

For the real people who read this blog, here’s a quick illustration of what hearsay means

 

  1. Kevin Pieterson goes into the witness box and describes how he watched Ian Bell hit a six right over the head of Mitchell Johnson  (direct evidence, no hearsay)

 

  1. Matt Prior goes in the witness box and describes how Kevin Pieterson TOLD him about seeing that six.  (That’s direct evidence that KP SAID it, but only hearsay evidence that Ian Bell did actually hit the six) 
  2. Graham Swann (swanny!) goes in the witness box and says that Matt Prior told him (swann)  that KP told him (prior)  that he (KP) had seen Ian Bell hit a six   (that’s now getting very removed from someone who can say whether Ian hit that six, and is hopeless at establishing whether it happened or not. Hearsay pure and simple)

 

 

 

In crime, there are complicated and technical rules on when hearsay evidence is admissible and when it is not. That’s why we family lawyers put those thick Law of Evidence tomes into cardboard boxes, scotch-tape them shut and put them in the attic as soon as our exams were over.

 

In family law proceedings, hearsay evidence is generally admissible

 

  1. There is a great deal of authority on the subject of hearsay evidence in cases concerning children. I will list below the authorities that were cited to us as of particular relevance to the issue but we were not asked to revisit them or to venture any general guidance, the appeal being approached with commendable practicality on the basis that the judge erred in the way in which she treated the evidence in this particular case. The authorities were: Official Solicitor v K [1965] AC 201; Re W (Minors)(Wardship: Evidence) [1990] 1 FLR 203; R v B County Council, ex parte P [1991] 1 FLR 470; Re N (Child Abuse: Evidence) [1996] 2 FLR 214; Re D (Sexual Abuse Allegations: Evidence of Adult Victim) [2002] 1 FLR 723; Re B (Allegation of Sexual Abuse: Child’s Evidence) [2006] EWCA Civ 773; H v L [2006] EWHC 3099 (Fam); B v Torbay Council [2007] 1 FLR 203; W (a child) [2007] EWCA Civ 1255; JFM v Neath Port Talbot Borough Council [2008] EWCA Civ 3; Enfield LBC v SA (By her Litigation Friend, The Official Solicitor) [2010] EWHC 196 (Admin); Re W (Children)(Abuse: Oral Evidence) [2010] UKSC 12 [2010] 1 FLR 1485; Surrey County Council v M, F and E [2013] EWHC 2400 (Fam).
  1. We were also referred to the Children (Admissibility of Hearsay Evidence) Order 1993, the Civil Evidence Act 1995 and Articles 6 and 8 ECHR.

 

 

In this case, a 28 year old woman T, made allegations that she had been sexually abused as a child. That was important, because she had younger siblings who were still children.  If T’s allegations were false, then there was no risk for those children. If, however, they were true, then there would be a potential risk.

 

A fact finding hearing therefore took place, for the Court to determine which of those two options was correct. The Court made findings that T’s allegations were true. T did not give evidence herself, and that’s why the case was appealed.

 

  1. Much of the local authority’s evidence in relation to the sexual abuse findings was hearsay. The principal source of evidence about what happened to T was obviously T herself. She had spoken to social workers about her experience in late 2012/early 2013 and they reported to the court what she had said. However, Judge Davies (who very properly attended to the case management of this case throughout) was quite rightly intent on ensuring that her evidence should be received by the court in a more direct form and made an order on 20 March 2013 that if the local authority were relying on her evidence, they were to file a statement from her. A date was given for the filing of the statement and when that was not complied with, an extension was given. However, still no statement was forthcoming.
  1. T’s position was discussed at a directions hearing on 6 June 2013. There is a difference of recollection as to the extent to which any reason was given for the absence of a statement from her but it may be that the local authority explained to the judge that T was not co-operating with the process, as Miss Heaton QC explained to us on their behalf during the appeal hearing. No orders were sought from Judge Davies or made by her with a view to resolving such problems as there were.
  1. By the time that the final fact finding hearing commenced on 17 June 2003, nothing had changed. T had not made a statement and she did not attend to give evidence. It seems that the hearing proceeded without any discussion of why this was or what should be done about it.
  1. T is a vulnerable adult who has suffered from depression and she has learning difficulties, although no one suggested that they were such as to prevent her from giving evidence. Social services are involved in relation to her children, of whom there are four, the youngest having been born at the end of April 2013. In her statement of 3 May 2013, Ms McMenemy (one of the social workers who gave evidence to Judge Davies) spoke of reports that T was under a great deal of pressure from her family to write a statement supporting them and said that T was not now willing to provide a statement confirming what she had said about abuse (B62/3). However, it appears that there was no up to date evidence about T’s position offered to the court either at the directions hearing on 6 June 2013 or at the fact finding hearing. The judge should at least have been told, for example, what efforts had been made to obtain a statement from T and/or to secure her attendance at court and why these had foundered, and she should have been fully informed about any continuing personal difficulties on T’s part which it appeared were getting in the way of the process.
  1. It may not be entirely surprising, in the circumstances, that the judgment contained no reference at all to the reasons why direct evidence from T was not available. The judge said only this about T’s absence:

“On behalf of F, I am reminded that he has Article 6 rights to a fair trial. I must bear in mind that he has a right to cross examine witnesses and, if witnesses have not been called to give evidence, I must consider what weight should be given to their evidence.” (§7)

“T has not been called to give evidence, either by the local authority or by the parents; and I must remind myself it is for the local authority to prove the case, it is not for the parents to disprove it.” (§8)

“I have to bear in mind that T has not attended court to be cross examined…” (§22)

 

 

The parents were not arguing that the hearsay evidence in relation to T’s allegations was not admissible (as they might have in a criminal trial) but rather that in the absence of T being available to be challenged, the Judge ought to have given that evidence much less weight.

 

The Court of Appeal took the view, and gave some guidance, that where the allegations that are central to the case are being made by an adult, all endeavours ought to be made to get that adult to give the evidence [particularly where, as here, T had previously retracted the allegations]

 

  1. Where an adult’s evidence is so central to a finding or findings sought, I would normally expect that adult to give evidence, although there can, of course, be situations in which that is not possible. Judge Davies herself made clear by her order of 20 March 2013 that she expected that T would furnish direct evidence. She was never asked to revoke that order, although equally she was not asked to direct that the local authority could not rely on the hearsay material as to what T had said.
  1. Where it is said to be impossible to obtain a statement from a witness or to secure a witness’s attendance at court, the court needs to know the reasons why so that that can be considered when, to use the phraseology of section 4 Civil Evidence Act 1995, “estimating the weight (if any) to be given to hearsay evidence”.
  1. There are ways in which witnesses can be assisted to overcome difficulties in engaging in court proceedings and the various options should always be considered when there are problems in getting evidence from a central witness. They include special measures such as screens in the court room or a video link. Alternatively, a witness summons may be appropriate. None of these options seem to have been considered in this case. We were told that T has recently given a statement to the police by way of an ABE video interview. Had that course been taken before the fact finding hearing, the video interview would at least have covered the ground that would have been covered by a statement. The question of cross examination could then have been addressed as a supplementary issue in the knowledge of what T had said in the ABE interview.
  1. Assuming that none of the available measures secures direct evidence from the witness, the judge has to have regard to the reasons for this in weighing the hearsay evidence on which reliance is placed instead. A judge may be less uncomfortable in giving weight to such evidence where there is a good reason for the witness’s non-engagement (such as the sort of profound psychological difficulties from which C is suffering or a protracted physical illness) than where the reason is hard to divine or the non-engagement appears to be a matter of deliberate choice on the part of the witness.
  1. The estimation of the weight to be given to T’s recent complaints was complicated by the fact that she had retracted what she said. She did so in the form of two letters. She has problems with literacy and they were written by her brother B and signed by her. The first is dated 6 February 2013 (E105). It alleges that social services are trying to “manipulate and intimidate me into making a statement” and says that she is not willing to make a statement about F molesting her as it would be a false statement. The second letter (E253) is undated but I think it was received by social services towards the end of April 2013. It says that social services had blackmailed her by saying they would pay for a deposit for a house move if she made a statement about F but that she would not do so as it would be false.
  1. The judge referred to the two letters in §§20 and 21 of her judgment but went on to make her findings about T’s complaints in §22 without setting out how she had approached them in her evaluation. She had earlier rejected the suggestion that the social workers had put pressure on family members to make untrue allegations (see §10) and found the social workers to be very careful in their evidence and accurate in their note-taking and recollection. This was, of course, material to her approach to the retraction letters in which improper conduct on the part of social services was suggested. She also stated in a different section of the judgment later on (§31) that she found that pressure had been put on T by B and by both parents to withdraw her allegations but this was a bald statement without any supporting analysis or details and without specific reference to the letters.
  1. The retraction of a complaint normally requires careful and specific consideration and this case was no exception. Obviously the fact that a complaint is subsequently retracted does not prevent a judge from accepting that it is in fact true but it gives rise to questions which must be addressed sufficiently fully and directly in the judge’s reasons so that one can be confident that the fact of the retraction has been given proper weight in the judge’s conclusions about the subject matter of the retracted allegation. Where, as here, the only evidence before the court about the complaint is hearsay, it seems to me that this is particularly so and the judgment was insufficiently specific in my view.

The Court of Appeal concluded that the findings made should be set aside and the case sent back for rehearing. In this particular case, they felt that there should be a fresh start before a different judge  (although that was not decided as a principle applicable to all cases)

 

 

[When I find myself in times of trouble, Andy Flower talks to me, we need a batting hero, get KP… Get KP, get KP, get KP, oh get KP, we need a batting hero, get KP]

 

 

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Yet more Serious Case Reviews

Posted on October 11, 2013 by suesspiciousminds

 

Whatever the collective noun for Serious Case Reviews is  (a flurry, a murmuring, an avalanche, a papering, an omphaloskepsis*, a whitewashing?) that’s what we’ve had over the last few weeks.

 

The first I read about this week was from Glasgow, and involved a foster carer who was murdered by a young person placed in her care.  The main lesson was to have been cautious about the very good progress this vulnerable and damaged young person was making in the early days of the placement and to have had proper access and regard to the full chronology of his troubled life.

 

http://www.glasgowchildprotection.org.uk/CHttpHandler.ashx?id=17069&p=0

 

 

The second was Child T, a four year old in Haringey. 

 

http://www.haringeylscb.org/child_t__full_serious_case_review_overview_report-2.pdf

 

Now, if there’s anywhere in the country that is nervous about Serious Case Reviews, it would be Haringey. They were the authority in Victoria Climbie and Baby P, and they really don’t want to have a third tragedy.  They were brave to hold this one, since it didn’t automatically meet the criteria and they could have ducked conducting one.

 

In my opinion, they did the right thing in conducting one – I may as well say up front here, that there are real problems with the way they managed the case prior to that decision. (Whilst I think professionals are often harshly blamed after the event for failing to see into the future, this isn’t one of those. Sometimes a cock-up is just a cock-up, and I won’t defend those.  I have to call this one as I see it, and children were harmed here over many months as a result of professional error)

 

The child did not die, fortunately, though on removal in 2011 was found to have fifty bruises on his body. On my count, there were four episodes of bruising. Alarmingly, the last happened AFTER he was seen with 50 bruises, a few days later, whilst the case was being prepared for Court with a plan of him continuing to live at home.

 

 

(A) On Wednesday 30/6/10, at 10:30 pm, Child T was taken to the Accident & Emergency Department (A&E) at North Middlesex Hospital (NMHUT) by his mother and Mr C. He had bruising around the eyes, forehead and nose. Bruising and swelling was said to have become worse during the day. Mr C said that Child T often ran around the house and ‘bangs and hits himself on the wall’ 

 

Child T was three years old at the time. You may, if you are familiar with Baby P, be having shuddering sensations at the suggestion that the child’s bruises were self-inflicted. We have heard that before.

 

It gets worse than that though, because what follows is something that the professionals never had in Baby P – a direct disclosure

 

(B)On 4/7/10 a Polish speaking doctor, PR1, spoke to various family members who were visiting the hospital. He was told, by Child W, that Mr C had hit her so as to cause bruising to her bottom. PR1 spoke to CP2 who subsequently spoke to the Enfield Emergency Duty Team2 (EDT) as it was now the evening. It was agreed that there were no grounds to keep Child W in hospital that night but that the concerns raised should be followed up the next day. The following day, 5/7/10, before any follow-up action was taken, Child T was removed from hospital by his mother and Mr C, without the agreement of medical staff. Over the previous days Mr C had increasingly expressed his annoyance about the child’s prolonged stay in hospital, because, he said,of the disruptive consequences for family life

 

[Note the involvement of Enfield, rather than Haringey – it seems that the hospital were slightly confused about which local authority were responsible, but after that referral the case got properly passed on to Haringey]

 

 

I have to say, as a child protection lawyer advising local authorities, having missed (A) would be quite bad but not dreadful, but having missed (B) would be dreadful.  Having missed (B) against the backdrop of Baby P is, on the face of it, hard to fathom.

 

There were bruises to a young child, unexplained, the sibling was saying that the mother’s boyfriend hit the children, the boyfriend was being annoyed in hospital and the child was removed without the consent of the doctors. That is pure alarm bell territory.

 

(It doesn’t HAVE to equate to removal, but it is certainly something that ought to have made everyone involved very very concerned and vigilant)

 

A strategy meeting took place – the medical opinion was reported to be inconclusive  and the police who attended weren’t aware of a domestic violence callout between mum and Mr C that same day.

 

[This is what was actually said, and anyone who thinks that this is ‘inconclusive’ is on another bloody planet

 

The medical report considered at the Strategy Meeting had stated that “I am very uncomfortable with the injury on his forehead. I do not accept that a 3 year old child would bang his head with such severity and not cry out. In addition, bruising on the leftside is in a very unusual place and this cannot be incurred either from fallingor from play. I cannot exclude the possibility that some of these may have arisen from pressure from fingers”  ]

 

 

Despite the strat meeting having concluded and the case progressing to relatively low action on the basis of the social worker and police deciding that the medical opinion was “inconclusive”, the Consultant Paediatrician who first saw the child (CP1) wrote a letter containing this

 

(C) “I would like to highlight that this child had an injury to his forehead resulting in a haematoma… that could only have occurred if there were a large amount of force on impact … the second fact that concerns me greatly is the presence of bruising on the left side of the rib cage. This is an unusual place for bruising to be found in a child and implies a second mechanism of injury taking place, once again for which the parents claim to have no knowledge. My concerns here are that this is a 3 year old boy who has had two separate injuries for which there have been no explanations and each injury individually is concerning and in an area which is quite uncommon in a child of this age”

 

 

I’ve defended social workers before, and I will again, and I defended particularly the social workers in Haringey who worked Baby P because I think that they were fundamentally let down by a paediatrician who didn’t give them the medical evidence they would have needed to act and get the case before a Court.  The paediatricians here did their job properly and they simply weren’t listened to.

 

But I am afraid that this is a smoking gun. If that came across my desk, we would be having an amazingly urgent legal planning meeting (i.e, “I’m on my way to you, RIGHT NOW”)  to discuss this child and work out what we would be doing to keep the child and siblings safe.  If the conclusion was to work with the family to keep the child at home, I’m fairly sure we would have been getting the case before the Court to endorse that plan. I don’t think I’ve ever worked with any local authority lawyer whose advice would not have been “this is going before a Court, as soon as possible”

 

 

(D) On 9th August 2010, Mr C presented at his GP with self-inflicted cuts to his arms. The GP did not make any referral to social services.

 

(E) On 30th August 2010, the mother was seen at an obstetrics appointment with bruising on her arms – the notes showed up the suspicions of domestic violence, the obstetrician invited mother to be admitted overnight, mother declined. She was very nervous and keen to leave, and Mr C was very keen to get out of the hospital. No referral was made.

 

 

(F) On 31/8/10 Mr C took Child T to the GP, saying that he was concerned that he child bruised easily. He had bruises to his back and legs. The GP (GP1) arranged blood tests which indicated no medical explanation for the bruising. On 17/9/10 Child T was seen by a nurse (PN1) for immunisations. She noticed bruises on his arms, legs and back and asked a GP (GP2) to see

him. GP2 examined the child and arranged for him to be seen for follow-up on 22/9/10.

 

 

Now, I already thought that (B) and (C) were bad things to miss, but to add (F) into the equation just reinforces this.  Very often with Serious Case Reviews there’s a prediction bias and hindsight bias that means that working back from a known outcome, we tend to see all the footprints leading up to that event as being obvious and inexorable and that ‘of course that’s where this is all going, how could nobody see it’

 

But regardless of that, which is something to always be very cautious about; if you have suspicious bruises to a child, a strong paediatric opinion about those bruises and then another episode of bruising two months later; something needs to be happening.

 

A worker could, potentially, have gripped the case and made a decision that this risk could be safely managed at home; but that needs to be a conscious and deliberate and deliberated decision, not just inactivity resulting in that happening.  It is STAGGERING that the social worker on the ground didn’t ever share the paediatrician’s letter at (C) with his/her manager.

 

(G) On 14th September 2010, Mr C told his GP that he was injecting heroin every day. Three weeks later, he said he was drug-free and needed no further help.

 

(H) When the sibling child Y was born in December 2010, hospital staff noted tension and arguments between the mother and Mr C

(I) On 15th  February 2011, the case was closed by the social worker

 

(J)  Three days later, on 18/2/11 (a Friday) police were called to the family homeby Ms B who made allegations of violent conduct by Mr C to her and to Child T. Police could see that the child was extensively bruised and they arrested Mr C. Child T was left overnight with his mother. There was no recorded consultation with the EDT at that point

 

(K)The following day Child T was taken by police for medical examination and was seen by a paediatric registrar (PR2). The EDT had been made aware of the situation in the morning and both police officers and an EDT officer, EDT1, attended the medical. Child T was found to have more than 50 bruises of varying ages and sizes. He told the doctor of having been hit with a belt and a

stick by Mr C. The doctor judged that many of the injuries were caused by physical abuse and that others were ‘highly suspicious’

 

(L) The doctor spoke to Ms B who described how she had been the subject of repeated physical assaults by Mr C. She also said that she had suspected that Child T was being abused by Mr C and that Child T had told her this. She further said that Child W had now also spoken of being physically assaulted by Mr C and that he had tried to drown her whilst bathing her a few weeks previously. She said she had not told Ms B at the time as Mr C had made her promise not to do so.

 

And this is obviously where proceedings finally began, right?

 

Wrong. Professionals agreed with mum that Mr C would move out, and that the children would stay with her.

 

(M) On 22nd February 2011, the children were all medically examined. The medical opinion was that the three older children had all been physically abused by Mr C, and that mother had failed to protect them and that the children should be removed to a place of safety.

 

As a result of that conclusion, the LA decided that proceedings were inevitable.

 

(N) The next day, (23.02.11) the social workers met with mum and told her that care proceedings were to be initiated. In a police interview at around the same time, Ms B said that she knew that Child T was hit more frequently when Mr C was taking drugs

 

 

(O) A Strategy Meeting was held on 25/2/11. Information had been gathered from the various health services involved and, for the first time, the facts of repeated bruising to Child T were drawn together with the knowledge of the current and previous injuries. Agencies were concerned that Ms B and MGM were aware of the abuse and had not acted to prevent it. It also appeared that there may have been discrepancies in the accounts they had given to various agencies. However there had been no evidence that either of them was responsible for any previous physical abuse and there was no indication that the children might be directly harmed by them, or did not wish to be with them. It was confirmed that care proceedings were to be initiated but that there should be no immediate attempt to remove the children.

 

(P) On 28/2/11 Ms B told SW2 that Child T had new bruising. Ms B claimed that she had asked Child T about this and he had said that the injuries had been inflicted by that social worker, SW2. Later that day Child T was taken to Accident & Emergency, NMUHT, in the company of his mother, a different Social worker and an interpreter. Child T said that the “lady” hit him. When asked what the lady looked like and how she did it, he was unsure. Following a medical examination, where new bruising was confirmed, and some new bruising was seen on Child W, all four children were brought into the care of the local authority.

 

 

 

 

On this one, I’m afraid that there is blame – it isn’t just a failure to predict something unpredictable, it isn’t taking an informed decision that the risk was manageable and the outcome turned out bad. This is a basic failure not to recognise what risk looks like and what to do with it.

 

I feel bad for the people involved, and who knows what the workloads and pressures were at the time; but I’m afraid that this is systemic failure, not just making a judgment call that proved wrong after the event.  It is REALLY, really hard to see why that vital letter from the paediatrician at (C) never got escalated into a child protection issue. The social worker never discussed it with her manager, and it did not get escalated into a Legal Planning Meeting.

 

If this is happening at Haringey, which must be alive like no other authority to the perils of getting child protection decisions wrong, something has gone very badly awry – perhaps locally, perhaps nationally.

 

Again, as with Keanu Williams, the case was effectively ring-fenced into a ‘child in need’ case at an early stage, and thoughts about child protection disappeared once the decision was made that this was a “child in need” case.  Even then, things aren’t great – he wasn’t properly treated as a “child in need” with a formal plan and review system. He just got lost.

 

 

I agreed with Eileen Munro that when one looks at Daniel Pelka’s case through the eyes of any individual professional it is hard to say that they got it wrong and that another worker in their shoes would not have acted similarly, but that’s not the case here.

 

In many ways, this Serious Case Review raises more worrying issues than the Baby P one – in that case, the local authority never had in their hands the medical evidence that would have allowed them to save Baby P. Here, the evidence was handed over and simply stuck in a filing cabinet without its significance being absorbed or considered until this child and his siblings sustained many more months of physical abuse.

 

I’m not sure that it gives us ‘lessons to be learned’ in general practice – the individual failings here were so pronounced and obvious that the real lesson is ‘if people don’t do their jobs properly, bad things can happen’.

 

Haringey’s Local Safeguarding board response, in the interests of fairness, is here  – and the incidents were two years ago, so they have had time to make some changes.

 

http://www.haringeylscb.org/haringey_lscb_s_response_to_the_scr_of_child_t-3.pdf

 

(I didn’t think it was great, to be honest, and it was very light on how they would prevent social workers wrongly going down the ‘child in need’ path when child protection is the real issue. Or that a strat meeting could so utterly misunderstand what the medics were saying. But at least there’s now a powerpoint strategy.  )

 

 

 

 

*For those who have made it thus far, Omphaloskepsis is ‘navel-gazing’ – it came into prominence during the Renaissance, when there was much debate about what a painter should do when painting the midriffs of Adam and Eve. Did they have belly buttons, or having never been in the womb, were they smooth?  If God made Man in his own image, does God have a belly button, or not? Because this was such a controversial issue, many such paintings just have hands or branches covering the vital area.

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“Eggs, eggs, damn all eggs!”

Posted on October 2, 2013 by suesspiciousminds

Judicial wrath about the pervasiveness of the word “concerns”  in a care case, and the word being used to mask the lack of substantiated evidence or allegations.

Re Avon, North Somerset and Gloucestershire Public Law Case 2013

 http://www.familylawweek.co.uk/site.aspx?i=ed117568

(The title is taken from the Master, P G Wodehouse, who described Bertie Wooster’s uncle, Lord Worplesden, as having one day come down to breakfast, lifted the silver platter and shouted “Eggs, eggs, damn all eggs!” before fleeing home and never being seen again.   I just like it as a pithy way to convey the feelings of sheer hopeless exasperation)

The Judge in this case made a number of complaints about issues that had arisen in the case – he anonymised the LA involved, by naming all three who regularly appear before him  (nice for the one in trouble, who got to hide in the shadows, but rather rough on the two completely innocent ones who get tarred with the brush of suspicion when they had nothing to do with it)

 

Many of the complaints, though made about the LA, also relate to judicial decision-making (the listing of a finding of fact hearing, the absence of a proper schedule of allegations, the delay, the proliferation of expert evidence – none of which can be done by an LA in isolation, the Court has to shoulder some of the responsibility for this)

 

But then it gets into interesting territory, where the Judge talks about the reasons given by professionals for not wanting to place the children with grandparents

 

 

10.  Time and again I was told that the Local Authority had ‘concerns’ about issues (the word ‘concern was used by the Local Authority advocate more than twenty times in one day). Those ‘concerns’ were not substantiated by direct evidence and should have been. I give this very clear example. The head teacher of a school was called to give evidence about events relating to the other children in the grandmother’s household. Her statement was about events in July 2013 and suggested difficulties within the grandmother’s home then. I asked [sic] whether the events of which she was speaking were representative of the school’s perception of the grandmother’s overall care of those children. I was told from the witness box that there were many other things that the school could say and would want to say. They were not contained in any statement but, I was told by counsel for one of the Respondent parties, reference to them could be found ‘dotted around’ the four lever arch files. Evidence was also available from the health visitor (but did not feature in any statement). If a Local Authority seeks to substantiate an important contention it must do so on direct evidence where that evidence is available. Hearsay evidence is admissible but that does not mean that a Local Authority can dot its contentions around a bundle and then expect a court to reach satisfactory conclusions on issues of such fundamental importance to children and families.

 

 

That does, to me, raise two very important issues.

 

Firstly that the word concern can be waved around in Court and be emphasised and repeated so much that ‘concerns’  (which end up being rather less than ‘allegations’ and far far less than “proven or determined facts”) begin to morph from an insubstantial wisp to solid reasons for not doing something.  I think the Court is right to drag everyone back to the foundation that we work on evidence and proven or provable FACTS, not flights of fancy.  Even where a risk is put as being one that “Cannot sensibly be ignored”   that determination has to be made on the Court establishing that facts that lead up to that risk are made out on the balance of probabilities.

 

Secondly, we are back on the issue that “Judges are not forensic ferrets”  – if the nub of the case is not gathered together in one place (with cross-referencing) but is dotted around the papers hither and thither, to be found by only assiduous reading, that simply won’t do.

 

 

This led on to the Judge’s proper criticism that what seemed to happen with the assessment of the grandparents is that professionals devoted all of their attention to negative criticisms and gave no thought or weight to the potential advantage of a child being cared for within the family or the potential disadvantages to the child of being cared for by strangers (the very heart of Re BS)

 

11. the unprincipled approach to welfare issues. Entirely omitted from the special guardianship report and much of the other welfare analysis were two matters which were of utterly elementary and fundamental importance:

i) The effect now of removing the boy from the grandmother. In welfare checklist language, what would be the effect on the boy of the proposed change in his circumstances that would arise if removed from his current home and what are his emotional needs to remain a part of his current household?

ii) The significance of the boy maintaining his place as a child cared for within his natural family. The boy has an established family life with his grandmother (Article 8 of the Convention was therefore engaged). He had spent the majority of his life in a household with other children there (aged 10, 12 and 15). His step grandfather had played a very full role in his upbringing. By remaining in his family he would continue to see his mother in structured contact.

12. I found it deeply demoralising that these simplistic issues could pass without even being mentioned. What happened in the hearing is that all possible negative points about the grandmother were explored in evidence. At least some of them had no foundation at all. Some of these negative ‘concerns’ were expressed in superlative, wholly unjustifiable and internally contradictory terms, especially within the special guardianship report. For instance I heard in oral evidence that the grandmother was not child focussed and did not co operate with professionals; that was not borne out by the report of the person who said it (or by the evidence of others) and was manifestly unbalanced. It is to the credit of the grandmother that she maintained her decorum whilst this whirl of ill considered evidence was being given about her.

 

Following Re BS, the obvious remaining piece of the jigsaw is going to be how the Court approach the assessment of family members and having a much more robust approach to testing the Local Authority’s assessments where these are ‘negative’   – and indeed whether there ought to be some ‘test’ that ought to be applied by the Court to determining whether a child could be placed with a relative notwithstanding that this is not the Local Authority’s plan.

 

I believe that the Court of Appeal might be mulling this issue at present…

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Always/never

Posted on September 29, 2013 by suesspiciousminds

I’ve been reading a book by Eric Schlosser recently, called “Command and Control”  – it is primarily about the history of incidents and accidents in America with nuclear weapons, Schlosser’s research turning up an eye-watering number of hushed-up accidents with nuclear bombs and missiles in America, including the centrepiece of his story a fire in a nuclear missile silo where workers battled to stop the fire detonating the warheads.

 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Command-Control-Eric-Schlosser/dp/1846141486/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1380449302&sr=1-1&keywords=command+and+control

It is a great book, with there being something good on every page (following the Raymond Chandler edict of “put a diamond on every page”) – whether that be Fermi’s calculations about the possibility of the first nuclear explosion potentially going wrong and setting fire to every atom of oxygen in earth’s atmosphere (that would be a bad thing), the fact that in the early days of the Cold War whilst US media politicians and military spoke about how the US military stockpile of nukes could wipe Russia off the map they actually had just one functioning nuclear weapon (“for all the talk about the stockpile, there was no stock, and there was not even a pile”), the naming of the early computer system to plan nuclear conflict being called M.A.N.I.A.C, the British nuclear bunker to plan for life after the apocalypse having a pub called “The Rose and Crown” in it, and much more.

But the bit that struck me, and is applicable to this blog generally, is the battle that the US had over this dilemma, “Always/Never”.  They wanted to make nuclear weapons that would ALWAYS detonate and work when they wanted them to, but would NEVER go off when they weren’t intended to. That means that they had to be reliable and ALWAYS detonate when fired, but had to be sturdy and strong enough to survive maintenance, fires, the planes they were in crashing or being shot down, even accidents with testing.

And that was a goal on paper, but the reality was that the show was being run by the military, and thus the “ALWAYS” part had priority. For them, it was more important that they knew that if the Russian planes or missiles went up, they could launch and hit their own targets and get the job done; than the risk that an accident might occur. Whilst the calculations on “NEVER” seemed pretty good – a one in ten million chance that any individual nuke would go off accidentally, when multiplied by the number that they ended up with, the risk ended up feeling pretty unpalatable. (And as Schlosser identifies, there ended up being hundreds of incidents where things went wrong with nukes, sometimes quite badly wrong)

 

Now, in child protection, we also run an “ALWAYS/NEVER” ideal.  Children who are going to be seriously hurt or killed by their parents should ALWAYS be protected and kept safe, and children who ought to be at home with their parents should NEVER be removed.  As Munro and others have identified, this ideal is never going to actually work 100% of the time in practice. The myth for a long time was that with more information, more assessment, more structure, more procedures, more rigour, we could get very very close to that 100% figure, but that’s only a myth.

At the moment, like the US military in the Fifties and Sixties, we are more focussed on the “ALWAYS” portion of the equation – we strive for ALWAYS/NEVER but the ALWAYS bit is more important. I can’t really think of a time when the fear of getting another child death has been higher, post Baby P, but as you can see, even with that heavy focus on child rescue, individual tragedies still occur.  Looking at the Looked after Children statistics recently published by the Department for Education https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/244872/SFR36_2013.pdf  in amongst the (imho wrongly triumphalist) boasting about the increase in number of adoptive placements found for children, is the incredible statistic that the numbers of children currently the subject of Placement Orders   (the legal order which sanctions an adoptive placement being found for the child) has gone up by 95% since 2009.   Ninety-five per cent.

 

Even against that backdrop, the Serious Case Reviews and child deaths continue to happen. Even when everyone is very heavily focussed on ALWAYS, the truth is that you can’t keep all children safe.

 

And of course, whilst a mistake in the ALWAYS part of the equation is easy to detect – the child dies, there is an inquest, a criminal trial, a serious case review – everyone knows that something went badly wrong;  any mistake in the NEVER part of the equation is harder to pick up. You can tell if you took too much of a risk with a child, because something awful happens. But you can’t tell if you were far too cautious with a child, because that child doesn’t go home, the family is broken up and you never know whether that was the right call or not.

Our legal system is intended to be the check and balance on the NEVER part of the equation – we have laws and case law which makes it plain how important family preservation is, and a forensic process that gives parents free legal advice, the opportunity to present their own evidence and to test the evidence against them, with independent judges to make decisions, and an appeal process as a safeguard for those individual judgments getting it wrong.

 

All of that isn’t foolproof though. It would be hard to devise a foolproof system – I know that some of my regulars believe that the threshold for child protection intervention ought to be more like criminal offences, and that cases should be decided by juries not judges. That may or may not help, but we only have to look at criminal trials to realise that things go wrong with those – the wrong people do get convicted; and undoubtedly a criminal definition of threshold, a criminal standard of proof, a jury system would be moving much more towards the NEVER side of the equation.  ( In our criminal justice system we accept the possibility that guilty people may go free as an acceptable price for ensuring that innocent people are not punished – and even then sometimes it still goes wrong and innocent people go to prison)

 

I don’t have any solutions – I think really my point is that there isn’t a solution that will deliver ALWAYS/NEVER in child protection – you’ll make mistakes on both sides of that equation, and lurching too much to either side produces more mistakes on the other.  It is important to remember that you are trying to balance family preservation and child rescue, and that this is a difficult task and there’s no easy shortcut to getting it right, and that sometimes with all the best intentions, individual mistakes will happen and get past the system. Each of those individual mistakes is life-destroying for families and for children.

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What the Court want from experts, and other adventures in judicial ass-whupping

Posted on August 19, 2013 by suesspiciousminds

The guidance given by the High Court in Re  IA (A Child: Fact Finding: Welfare: Single Hearing : Experts Reports) 2013

http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Fam/2013/2499.html

This case covers a LOT of interesting stuff, so although the guidance on expert reports is the highlight, there’s other valuable information within it; including a kicking for the Local Authority (the Judge agreeing that a suggestion that the social worker had been ‘sticking the boot in’ was apt and justified), the fact that the High Court don’t like mother’s being referred to as “mom”  (hello everyone in the West Midlands!)  a finding of fact exercise being completed years after the event, some very important judicial comments about what could be reasonably expected of the mother, a reverse-ferret from the professionals and an unexpected outcome.

There are many sections of the judgment where the Judge could easily have prefaced with a  “Now I’m gonna open up a can of whup-ass”

Let’s start with the expert report.

  1. Dr Rylance’s report
  1. The very last matter for comment arises from Dr Rylance’s report. When I sanctioned his instruction in February, it was on the basis that he should “provide a short report on KA’s clinical presentation following the injuries sustained and …interpret blood test results.” Ms Jacobs letter of instruction explicitly referred to the President’s very recent Practice Direction in relation to Experts. She attached a copy to her letter. Although there is no mention of it with the correspondence, Ms Jacobs informs me that Dr Rylance was requested to confine his report within 10 to 12 pages. He apparently said he was content to do so.
  1. When he gave evidence, Dr Rylance confirmed he was aware of the reforms to the way in which experts are now required to report, that they should be succinct, focused and analytical and should avoid recitals of too much history and factual narrative.
  1. Dr Rylance’s report was 35 pages long. There was a reasonably lengthy section comprising the relevant background information (5 pages) extrapolating material from reports of other doctors and the medical records. Dr Rylance then dealt with the following issues – Timeframe for fractures; Possible / likely mechanism/ causation of rib fractures; Possible / likely mechanism / causation of right tibia metaphyseal fractures; Force to cause the fractures of the 4th and 5th ribs laterally; Force to cause metaphyseal fractures. He devoted about 5 pages to the issues of likely reaction at the time of and in the aftermath of injury and to whether or not a non perpetrator would have had awareness. Over the course of 5 pages, he provided advice upon the potential for there to have been a medical explanation for the rib fractures. Dr Rylance then tackled the explanations given by the parents and gave an opinion on plausibility before turning to consider (on page 25) the post mortem blood test results and their significance. He also provided an opinion as to the likely cause of the rib fractures.
  1. None of the foregoing was requested. Those matters did not form any part of his instruction and for the obvious reason that Professor Malcolm had already reported in relation to them.
  1. On page 27 of his report, Dr Rylance turned to consider and answer the specific questions asked of him, referring as he did so to many of his earlier paragraphs, as relevant, and repeating their content.
  1. In the 1980s and 1990s before it became the norm for experts (particularly paediatricians and psychologists) to produce absurdly lengthy reports, courts were routinely confronted with, for example, radiological reports in the form of letters which extended to about a page and a half. Professor Christine Hall at Great Ormond Street Hospitals was masterly in her ability to distil essential information and opinion within an impressively succinct report.
  1. Her contributions to cases of this kind, and she was but one example of the then general trend in radiology, contained all the judge needed to know about the nature of the injury, mechanism, force required, likely acute and sequential symptoms, whether a proffered explanation was consistent with the injury as revealed or not.
  1. Reports of that kind were singularly helpful. The modern way exemplified by Dr Rylance’s over-inclusive and doubtless expensive report is no longer acceptable. Experts must conform to the specifics of what is asked of them rather than, as here, provide something akin to a ‘paediatric overview.’ I struggle to recall a single instance when such expansive and all inclusive analysis has been of real utility in a case of this kind.

In short – keep it short and focussed. And if the Court ask that the expert report is no longer than 10-15 pages, it had better not come in longer than that.

Anyway, the case itself. The mother and father had previously had another child, KA, who died when four months old, and who had had injuries discovered post-mortem. This had happened in 2011, and two years later, no charges had been brought.  As there was no other child at that time, there had been no care proceedings brought.  Thus, when the parents had their second child, IA, there had been no resolution, criminal or civil, as to how KA had died and whether there was any culpability on behalf of the parents.

The father had also had a child EA, and he had received a conviction for fracturing EA’s arm, although he denied that he had done this, he was rather undone by his pre-sentence report where he expressed remorse and contrition for what he had done. He had of course, told his family and the mother, the time-honoured explanation that he hadn’t done it but that his lawyer had told him to plead guilty to get a lighter sentence.  (Naughty criminal lawyers, who always tell people to plead guilty when they are asserting their innocence. Naughty!  /end sarcasm)

The Judge conducted a finding of fact hearing and concluded that the father had caused the injuries to KA and EA.  The Judge also concluded that the injuries to KA had happened at a time when mother was out of the home and father was the sole carer, and that thus mother had had no idea of what had happened and had not failed to protect.

The Local Authority had asserted that mother ought to have separated from the father following KA’s death, and not gone on to have another child with him. The LA had been seeking a plan of adoption, and put their position as baldly as this:-

When the case was opened on Tuesday of last week, the London Borough of Croydon was inviting me to make a care order predicated on a care plan of adoption. It was said that even if the mother was not involved in causing the older child’s injuries and did not know that he had suffered fractures it would nevertheless still not be safe to return the baby to her care. It did not bode well for the mother’s ability to prioritise the child’s needs over her own in the years to come, said Mr Date on behalf of the local authority, that it had taken her two years to come to a position of being able to make concessions in relation to failure to protect.

She separated from the father shortly after the proceedings relating to IA had commenced (this being of course, before any findings were made about the injuries)

This is what the Judge decided about whether mother was culpable in any way in not separating from the father sooner.  (Hint, the Judge doesn’t end up agreeing with the LA)

  1. The circumstances prevailing at the time of and leading up to the period when injury is inflicted are all important. It would be manifestly unjust and inappropriate to look back, with the benefit of hindsight, so as to conclude that a parent had failed to protect because of information which became available him / her after key events occurred.
  1. Thus, in the current context, it becomes crucial to consider what this mother knew or ought to have known by the time that KA came to be injured. There is, in fact, no dispute. She knew only what the father and his loyal family had told her about events involving EA. The mother was led to believe that the father was essentially innocent of wrongdoing, that the broken arm had been caused by EA’s mother and that the father had only pleaded guilty so as to avoid being sent to prison – he’d received advice that imprisonment was altogether more likely if he was convicted after a trial.
  1. The mother described within her written evidence how her relationship with the father began, developed and became secure. He came across as extremely genuine; he respected and treated her well. She relates that in the months leading up to KA’s death, they had laughed a lot; she felt they had a great relationship and thought she had found her ‘soul mate’. She was never shown any violence or aggression. Even when they argued, he did not frighten or worry her. Nor did he ever ‘raise a hand’ to her. The only occasion upon which the mother witnessed the father as aggressive was when, after KA’s death, the father punched her former step father. At that time, as she said, “everything felt very raw.”
  1. Those who knew the father best, namely his family, maintained his version of history. The paternal grandmother struck the mother as someone who would not stand by if she “felt something was not right and would speak her mind.” And yet, when the mother asked her and the father’s sister about his previous relationship with EA’s mother, they supported him, saying it had been turbulent. The mother believed neither the grandmother nor the father’s sister would have been supportive of him if they believed he had done anything wrong.
  1. I do not believe she could be criticised for that which seems to me to be an altogether reasonable assumption, particularly given that the father’s sister has children of her own.
  1. No one opened the mother’s eyes to the realities in relation to EA. She had no access to any of the court papers from the 2007 care proceedings. Nor, indeed, did she know of their existence; and that continued to be the position until the interval between her first and second police interviews in 2011 when there was a conversation with the father in which he had told her about EA’s family proceedings. She had no contact with the probation service because the father’s deliberate ploy was to keep her away from his probation officer. There was no ongoing local authority involvement with the father after the conclusion of the care proceedings in early 2008; and thus no opportunity for the mother to discover the actuality.
  1. It is also relevant that the mother was 21 years old when she met the father and only 22 when KA was born. Should she have asked more questions? I don’t believe it is fair or reasonable to conclude she should. On behalf of the local authority, Mr Date suggests that at the time of KA’s death, the mother’s failure was that she did not recognise the warning signals and too readily accepted the father’s version of past events. I cannot agree, on a dispassionate analysis of the evidence, that those suggestions are apt. There were no warning signals. She was young and very much in love, entitled to trust what she was told by her partner particularly when his behaviour mirrored the notion that he was anything other than a danger to children.
  1. It should be said that the mother, both in her written and oral evidence, has been all too ready to acknowledge that she failed to protect KA. She said that by choosing to get into a relationship with the father, trusting and having a child with him, her son has come to harm. If she had not got into that relationship KA would not have been harmed; and therefore, she said, she has failed her child. As a mother she wanted to do everything she could to protect him so she feels she let her first son down.
  1. I have no doubt as to the mother’s sincerity. She was an extraordinarily impressive, transparently honest witness, revealing the depth of her sorrow time and time again throughout her evidence.
  1. That said, I do not believe she should be as hard on herself as she has been. Standing back as I do, weighing information from all sides, there is in truth nothing to substantiate the claims that the mother should have acted differently, has failed to respond to a developing situation in which the child was placed at risk or otherwise should be seen as blameworthy for what happened to KA. Put shortly and more simply, the mother did nothing wrong. She is not to be viewed as a parent who has failed to protect her son. She is blameless in relation to him.

That is a pretty full exoneration.

The Judge then gives some useful comments about the process by which a parent arrives at a decision to separate from a partner who would be viewed as being dangerous, and applies that process to the facts of the mother’s case. (I have underlined a passage which I think those representing parents may find particularly useful, and which given that we still don’t know how fact-finding cases are going to fit into the PLO seems to me very important. I expect to see it cropping up in position statements quite often)

  1. It is often and wisely said that the enlightenment process for the non abusing parent, particularly those who are not found responsible in any way for what occurred, should properly be seen as ‘a journey.’ It is expecting far too much, indeed it borders on the surreal, to suggest that more or less immediately in the aftermath of whatever defining incident, the innocent and truly ignorant parent should shun the other, depart the relationship and make definitive judgments for herself as to what has occurred.
  1. Here, as the mother movingly relates, it is very difficult to describe what it is like to lose a child. It was for her an “extremely lonely and alienating experience.” “Everyone around her had known her child had died but no one knew what to say.” She had “felt angry and upset that (her own) and KA’s privacy had been invaded when everyone came to watch the air ambulance landing in the local school so that he could be taken to hospital.” People, said the mother, “had not felt able to ask her how she was or how she was feeling.” She became aware she “was making people feel awkward just by being there and being sad.” She had stopped wanting to go out, wore sunglasses if she did to avoid eye contact and “pretended she was invisible.”
  1. The mother explained that she felt the father was really the only one who understood how she was feeling as he was going through the same thing. It had made her unite with him more and she was in no emotional state to start contemplating that he could have been the one who hurt KA.
  1. She goes on to describe how, after KA’s funeral in September 2011, the intensity of the police investigation died down as did her conversations with the father about what had happened to their son. She knew there “remained a huge question mark which (she) would have to confront. However the weeks and months drifted on and (they) continued in a state of limbo.” No one had been asking her to think about what had happened to KA and she “supposed it was easier for (her) to cope with trying to grieve if she did not ask those questions” herself. For about a year the mother, was taking anti depressants and “just about coping.”
  1. When soon after July 2012, she discovered she was pregnant, the mother had mixed feelings, knowing there was every likelihood she would not be given the chance to care for another baby whilst KA’s death was being investigated. She said in evidence she had contemplated an abortion. She had not wanted to bring a child into the world in such unsettled circumstances but she “could not do it – lose one child and then get rid of another.” But she had been “very, very scared.” She added she had “brought her second son into the world, he had been separated from her which was not the normal way.” She feels guilty about letting her first son down and that “will never go away.”
  1. I cannot find the mother culpable or deficient in relation to what she has done or omitted to do since KA died. Reading her statements, listening to her evidence, I was profoundly impressed by her ability to describe her feelings. Nothing she described seemed to me to be anything other than the entirely understandable reactions of a bereaved and grieving mother. Her reactions to a rapidly developing situation after proceedings were begun in February this year, to my mind, were entirely reasonable. I find it impossible to be critical of her responses and choices living through events, as they have unfolded, since KA’s death.
  1. It is noteworthy that, hitherto, most parents in this mother’s situation, have had the opportunity to participate at a two-stage care process – fact-finding followed some weeks, even months, later by welfare determination. Because from the child’s perspective it was vital so to do, those who were found to have failed to protect have been afforded the opportunity for reflection upon the judgment. There was then the potential for establishing whether there were signs of acknowledgment, sufficient to embark upon a process of rehabilitation. In this instance, there has been no such relaxed opportunity – responses were required in advance of fact finding in order to prepare welfare plans.
  1. The impact of the consolidated hearing is that this mother, according to the way in which the local authority puts its case, has been expected to work out causation for herself in advance of the evidence being given, respond accordingly and defend her conduct as far back as August 2011. She is castigated for failing to separate from the father immediately after IA’s birth. Those expectations, to my mind, are profoundly unjust. They elevate what might be expected of a parent into the realms of professional reaction; a professional moreover seized of all relevant information.
  1. All the signs are that the mother is not only capable of protecting IA, she is alert to the reality which is that she finds herself now in more or less the same situation as a first time mother. She described how KA’s death had left her anxious as does the fact that hitherto she has not been IA’s main carer. So she is worried about him settling and grateful to know that the support of her own mother will be right there.

The LA at the start of the case had been seeking the findings, and a plan of adoption. The Guardian had been asking for an assessment of the maternal grandmother, who was putting herself forward as either an alternative carer or as someone who could live with the mother.

After the grandmother gave evidence, the Local Authority had a change of heart

  1. At the conclusion of the grandmother’s evidence, Mr Date announced that the local authority had been “hugely impressed” by her; and that he would no longer be asking me to endorse a care plan for adoption. There was agreement from the local authority that the child should be placed together with his mother in the grandmother’s home. Over the weekend, that plan has crystallised to this – that a residence order should be made either to the maternal grandmother alone or jointly with the mother; and there should be a supervision order for 12 months in favour of a specified local authority in the West Midlands.
  1. In similar vein, when Ms Dinnall (the Guardian) went into the witness box on Friday, she relinquished her recommendation for further assessment, lending support to the suggestion that the child should be looked after by his grandmother and mother together under the auspices of a supervision order.
  1. I have struggled to recall an instance where there have been quite such dramatic changes of position amongst the professionals; and whilst from the family’s perspective (particularly the mother’s and grandmother’s) those shifts were so very welcome, it must also be said that in the weeks leading up to this hearing there have been serious errors of judgment in the care planning exercise.

It is no great surprise that the Court endorsed the plan that mother and grandmother should care for IA jointly.

The next passages deal with the judicial criticism of the LA’s conduct of the case.  The social worker is named in these passages – I don’t know the social worker in question and can’t comment as to whether these criticisms apply across the board or just to this case, but she certainly takes a hell of a kicking.

I report these not just for schadenfreude, but because it touches on issues of expertise and the intention in the PLO of social workers being treated as experts. In order for that to work, the quality of work has to be substantially better than this.  Underlining again mine for emphasis.

  1. 94.   Case handling by the local authority
  1. Turning from the issues for decision to other matters, I cannot leave this case without commenting upon the way in which it has been handled by the local authority.
  1. I take account, of course, of the considerable difficulties drawn to my attention by Mr Date in his final submissions – that the social services department is “an unhappy place;” that Ms Kanii, who had no handover from the previous worker has only been in post for six weeks; that there has been a change of team manager during that time and changes of personnel as well within the legal department. Mr Date accepts that the work of assessment undertaken by Ms Kanii was not as thorough as it should have been and the conclusions reached were incorrect.
  1. All of that said, I should have been in the position of being able to place reliance upon the social work assessment so as to reach proper welfare determinations for IA. I should have had fair, balanced and proportionate advice resulting from a thorough inquiry undertaken over the five months or so since the proceedings were begun in February. I should have been able to view the social workers as experts in relation to the child’s welfare and to repose trust in their decision making.
  1. As it is, I am bound to say that Ms Kanii’s work was of poor quality, superficial and, most worryingly of all, did not reflect the key principles which underpin the workings of the family justice system. I mention just three – first that wherever possible, consistent with their welfare needs, children deserve an upbringing within their natural families (Re KD [1988] AC 806; Re W [1993] 2FLR 625); second, that the local authority’s duty should be to support and eventually reunite the family unless the risks are so high that the child’s welfare requires alternative provision (Re C and B (Care Order; Future Harm) [2001] 1FLR 611); and third that orders ratifying a care plan for adoption are “very extreme” only made when “necessary” for the protection of the children’s interests, which means “when nothing else will do”, “when all else fails.” Adoption “should only be contemplated as a last resort” (Re B [2013] UKSC 33; Re P (a child) EWCA Civ 963; Re G (a child) EWCA Civ 965).
  1. The mother’s second statement refers to the difficulty she encountered in speaking with Ms Kanii. She said she found her “quite intimidating” and she gained the “impression she had formed her opinions before really speaking with (her)”.
  1. I found Ms Kanii to be quite extraordinarily uncompromising. Interested only in repeating her own view and seemingly unwilling to countenance she may have misjudged anyone. Overall, I would have to say she was quite arrogant. She delivered her evidence at breakneck pace and could not be persuaded to slow down notwithstanding several reminders. She referred to the mother throughout as “Mom” which seemed to me somewhat disrespectful. But the most important matter of all is that on any objective analysis, Ms Kanii simply made significant errors of judgment in her appraisal of the mother as well as the maternal grandmother.
  1. In relation to the mother, Ms Kanii said it is “her view that she cannot care for IA. She lacks insight into significant harm. She would fail to protect the baby. She would not be able to prioritise his needs over her own.” Ms Kanii went on to say that the mother would “struggle to prioritise the child’s needs because fundamentally she does not grasp the significance of harm and how that would impact a child.”
  1. As for the maternal grandmother, Ms Kanii’s overall position was that although the grandmother “came across as quite willing, she was not able to prioritise the needs of the child over those of her daughter.”
  1. Challenged in cross examination by Miss Rayson and Miss King, and very properly so, Ms Kanii was essentially unmoved. Her only concession was that in the event the father was found to be the perpetrator then she favoured some further assessment of the maternal family. Although Ms Kanii denied she had “put the boot in” whenever the opportunity to do so had arisen, I’m impelled to say that Miss Rayson’s suggestion was both apt and justified.
  1. Ms Kanii’s written statement and addendum viability assessments, it has to be said, were perfunctory, lacking in balance and indefensibly critical of the mother and grandmother. I was left bemused that such adverse judgments had been made of the mother in particular when the content of her written statements had given me such cause for optimism. My sense was that Ms Kanii could not have read and assimilated the mother’s statements and yet she said she had. More bewildering still was the thought that the mother must have presented very similarly in discussion with Ms Kanii to the way in which she reacted in the witness box. And yet, such harsh judgments were made. It seems to me that Ms Kanii was operating in a parallel universe, intent on securing a placement order whatever the strengths within the natural family.
  1. Finally, in relation to this, two things should be said. First, I strongly believe – though cannot know – that Mr Date as the head of the local authority’s team intervened during the course of last week so as to retrieve an increasingly hopeless situation. If I am right about that, then I would wish to express my gratitude to him or to whichever individual it was who reconfigured the local authority’s position.

All in all, I think an important and illuminating case, and one which I expect to see cropping up from time to time. The importance of social workers evidence being balanced and not merely advocating for the desired course of action they recommend is vital, if care proceedings are to be fairly determined.

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Laying down a marker – the Court of Appeal speaks on analysis of welfare checklist

Posted on August 6, 2013 by suesspiciousminds

As regular readers will know, we had been anticipating the Court of Appeal in Re B S  to deal with issues of how appellant Courts were to tackle appeals in the light of the changes to the tests highlighted by the Supreme Court in Re B.

We hadn’t necessarily anticipated that the Court of Appeal would get under the bonnet of this issue before then, but to an extent, they have, in Re G (A child) 2013. The case really delves very carefully into an often overlooked aspect of the judicial decision-making – the welfare checklist.

http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2013/965.html

The facts of the original case , determined by a District Judge (which was appealed, and then that appeal decision appealed to the Court of Appeal) aren’t really that important.

What is important is the Court of Appeal’s clear guidance as to how Judges in care proceedings are to tackle the task.

In broad terms, this is the order of events

  1. The Court must establish the facts and particularly to make findings on any relevant facts or disputed facts
  2. The Court must then evaluate whether on the basis of those facts, the section 31 threshold is crossed
  3. The Court should then apply the welfare checklist to the circumstances of the case
  4. If the case involves a plan of adoption, the Court should also apply the welfare checklist as set out in the Adoption and Children Act 2002 to the circumstances of the case
  5. The Court should then consider proportionality when determining what order to make, and in an adoption case must specifically address the formulation set down by the Supreme Court in Re B  (in essence that ‘nothing else will do’

Nothing within that sequence of events is at all controversial or new. What might be new is the Court of Appeal’s focus on the welfare checklist and how that exercise must be approached judicially, and by any appellant Court looking at whether the exercise was approached.

In particular whether the approach of dealing with the welfare checklist in a linear way – by looking at the merits of the parents case against the welfare checklist and then only at point (g) range of powers available to the Court mapping out the pros and cons of the various options, is in fact the wrong way to go about things.

  1. The wording of certain elements of the welfare checklist must, I would suggest, involve a direct comparison of the relevant options that are being considered, for example:

(c) the likely effect on him of any change in his circumstances;

(e) any harm which he has suffered or is at risk of suffering;

(f) how capable each of his parents, and any other person in relation to whom the court considers the question to be relevant, is of meeting his needs.

  1. Under s 1(3)(c), consideration of the effect of any change in the child’s circumstances must involve considering, in the present case, not just the prospect of returning to the mother’s care but must include consideration of the effects, positive and negative, of placement in long-term foster care. Under s 1(3)(e), consideration of the risk of harm obviously will include the potential for future harm from parental care, but must also require evaluation of any risk of harm from the alternative option provided by ‘any other person’, namely the local authority as corporate parent, for example emotional harm as a result of long-term separation of a child from his parent. Under s 1(3)(f), when considering how capable ‘each of his parents, and any other person’ are to meet the child’s needs, again I would suggest that, alongside consideration of the parent’s capacity, there is a need to look at the strengths and detriments in the local authority’s capacity to meet his needs through long-term fostering.

 

What the Court of Appeal are saying here is that the Court must not simply look at the case for the child remaining with the parent, analyse this, and then if determining that this is not possible, move on to considering what type of order would be appropriate.  The Court cannot properly decide whether the child should be with a parent based on the pluses and minuses of THAT option, but must weigh into the balance the pluses and minuses of the OTHER options.

It is not, as they say, a linear exercise, but one of laying out the various options and comparing them alongside one another. When considering, for example, the ‘capacity of the parent or any other person to meet his needs’ the Court must not only look at what the parent could offer under no order or a Supervision Order, but what the Local Authority could offer (including any deficiencies) under a Care Order or Placement Order.

The structure of the welfare checklist, culminating as it does with the “range of powers available to the Court” seems to tempt the Court into approaching that comparison of the various orders only at that stage, but this would be the wrong approach.

They develop this further – underlining mine

  1. In most child care cases a choice will fall to be made between two or more options. The judicial exercise should not be a linear process whereby each option, other than the most draconian, is looked at in isolation and then rejected because of internal deficits that may be identified, with the result that, at the end of the line, the only option left standing is the most draconian and that is therefore chosen without any particular consideration of whether there are internal deficits within that option.
  1. The linear approach, in my view, is not apt where the judicial task is to undertake a global, holistic evaluation of each of the options available for the child’s future upbringing before deciding which of those options best meets the duty to afford paramount consideration to the child’s welfare.
  1. One only has to take an extreme example of the effect of linear consideration to see the potential danger for this approach. The linear model proceeds by evaluating and then eliminating each individual option in turn before selecting the option at the end of the line, without evaluation of its own internal merits or de-merits, simply on the basis that it is the only remaining outcome. Much therefore depends on which end of the line the selector starts the process. Conventionally those judges who deploy a linear approach start, for understandable reasons, with the option of rehabilitation to a parent and end with the option of a care or adoption order. If, however, for the purposes of observing the dangers in the process, one were to start at the other end of the line and look at long-term foster care or adoption first, and were then to rule that out on the basis that there are risks and negatives attaching to it, the linear approach would soon arrive at ‘rehabilitation to a parent’ as the only remaining option and select that without any consideration of whether that is in fact the best outcome for the child. All would agree that such an approach would be untenable. I hope, however, that this example demonstrates how inappropriate the linear model is for a judge who is tasked with undertaking a multi-faceted evaluation of a child’s welfare at the end of which one of a range of options has to be chosen.

And later

  1. A further concern about the linear model is that a process which acknowledges that long-term public care, and in particular adoption contrary to the will of a parent, is ‘the most draconian option’, yet does not engage with the very detail of that option which renders it ‘draconian’ cannot be a full or effective process of evaluation. Since the phrase was first coined some years ago, judges now routinely make reference to the ‘draconian’ nature of permanent separation of parent and child and they frequently do so in the context of reference to ‘proportionality’. Such descriptions are, of course, appropriate and correct, but there is a danger that these phrases may inadvertently become little more than formulaic judicial window-dressing if they are not backed up with a substantive consideration of what lies behind them and the impact of that on the individual child’s welfare in the particular case before the court. If there was any doubt about the importance of avoiding that danger, such doubt has been firmly swept away by the very clear emphasis in Re B on the duty of the court actively to evaluate proportionality in every case.
  1. In mounting this critique of the linear model, I am alive to the fact that, of course, a judgment is, by its very nature, a linear structure; in common with every other linear structure, it has a beginning, a middle and an end. My focus is not upon the structure of a judge’s judgment but upon that part of the judgment, indeed that part of the judicial analysis before the written or spoken judgment is in fact compiled, where the choice between options actually takes place. What is required is a balancing exercise in which each option is evaluated to the degree of detail necessary to analyse and weigh its own internal positives and negatives and each option is then compared, side by side, against the competing option or options.

I think those words about “formulaic window dressing” are apt – and are similar in nature to the reinforcement of the Supreme Court in Re B that the Court have to genuinely look at and tackle proportionality and human rights, rather than just the stock phrases of ‘the interference with article 8 is proportionate and necessary in this case to safeguard the child’ without looking behind that stock phrase into what is genuinely meant and intended.  When the term ‘draconian’ is thrown about the Court room, which it is, and often– if one were somehow able to calculate all of the occasions when the word ‘draconian’ was uttered I think 85% or more would be in the Family Court;  it isn’t sufficient just to say the word, those present must feel the weight of what that word really means.

It becomes clear then, that the role of a Court in determining any application for public law orders is to get heavily stuck into the Welfare Checklist. The culture that has sprung up over years of the Welfare Checklist largely being extracted from the social worker’s statement with perhaps a few corrections or additions here or there, is unlikely, in the light of Re G to be sufficient.

This must be an comparative exercise balancing each of the options open to the Court and weighing them each against the other. It would be fair to say that most Welfare Checklists I have seen have been constructed more on the linear model, where one starts with an assumption that the child should be placed with the parents and analyses whether or not that is possible, rather than following each of the options through each stage and weighing each against the other. The weighing process, if any, tends to happen at the very end of the Welfare Checklist once the linear process has been undertaken (resulting in either ‘Yes, child can be with the parent’ or ‘no, the child can’t be with the parent’) when it comes to the Range of Powers available to the Court and positing which orders are appropriate on the basis of the linear process having ruled in or ruled out the child being with a parent.

Re G makes the Welfare Checklist even more important than it is at present, at the very time of course, that the PLO standardised documents take it out as a flowing self-contained part of the social work evidence and it vanished from Guardian’s reports long ago in all but very rare cases. Judges will now have to fish around in the social work statement for the social work analysis of the welfare checklist, scattered as it now is throughout the document rather than residing in one defined section.

As the Court of Appeal say in this case about the two Judges whose decisions were the subject of this appeal (underlining mine again)

Before moving on, I would like to acknowledge the strong professional sympathy that I feel for DJ               and HHJ                          who find themselves in the invidious position of having their judgments subjected to scrutiny by the Court of Appeal armed, as it always is, with 20/20 hindsight but, on this occasion, also armed with a strong decision from the Supreme Court that has been injected into the mix between their respective involvements in the case and this judgment. I wish to stress that the observations that now follow are made in this case because it provides the opportunity to do so, and not because there is anything in these two judgments which is worthy of additional individual criticism. My working life is now spent very largely in reading first instance, and less frequently, first level appeal judgments. The concerns that I have about the process in this case are concerns which have also been evident to a greater or lesser extent in a significant number of other cases; they are concerns which are now given sharper focus following the very clear wake-up call given by the Supreme Court in Re B. I therefore hope that DJ              and HHJ                      will be stoic and may see their judgments in this case as being the unwitting launch vehicles for what now follows, rather than its specific target.

I suspect that in the immediate future, advocates will be particularly alert during the passages of a judgment that deal with the welfare checklist, because the cursory race through it, or  formulation of “I adopt the welfare checklist as set out in the social work final evidence” will not be sufficient.

(Moving on from this, one MIGHT conclude that in order for Judges to properly and thoroughly analyse the weaknesses of the care that the State can provide for any particular child, some proper independent, neutral, rigorous and up to date research on delay, breakdown rates, abuse in State care,  the factors that are indicative of a successful or poor prognosis for children in State care or adoptive placements, children’s thoughts and feelings about being cared for by the State, how issues of loss endure or resolve for these children and outcomes for children in State care would be both extremely helpful and long overdue.  Otherwise there is a risk that the information is either overly rose-tinted or overly negative depending on who is providing it to the Judge)

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Doc, Doc,Doc Doc Doctor Beat

Posted on July 7, 2013 by suesspiciousminds

 

When Judges disagree with doctors  – I’ve been interested in this for a little while now, and another case of this type has just flitted across my screen, so,

 

a quick run down of the recent reported cases where the Courts have, in considering an NAI case, gone against the medical evidence (or at least some of the medical evidence)  to find that the parent had not caused the injury.

 

This is very unscientific, I have just gone to a well known caselaw database and looked for family cases under the topic “medical”, so some cases will not have come up. I’ve just looked over the last 3 years.

 

[I am not, in case you doubt, arguing that the Court was wrong to do so in any individual case.  There’s a wealth of strong law about it being a matter for the Judge, not the doctor and the other factors to be taken into account, but I had in mind that it seems to be an increasing trend for Courts to go beyond the medical evidence and to decline to make findings based on the wider evidence, including often entertaining the hypothesis that today’s medical certainty may be tomorrow’s grey area and I wanted to look at that. Again, whether that is a good or bad thing depends on the individual facts of the case and your viewpoint. It is overall, of course, the job of Courts in finding of fact cases to get as close to possible as they can to the truth after a forensic exercise marshalling as much information as possible.

 

All of these cases may be worth a look if you are representing a parent in an NAI case where the medical evidence is not promising]

 

 

This is the most recent one

 

 Re A (A child) 2013   – child of a year old, two rib fractures. Mother said caused by a fall on him by an older sibling, all medical evidence was that this was highly unlikely. Evidence in the case of mother having a loving relationship with the child, Judge found that the injuries had not been deliberately caused, Court of Appeal upheld this.

 

Re R 2013  – 14 month old boy suffered burns from scalding water in a bath. Mother said he had been left alone for a brief period with no water in the bath and had turned the taps on himself.  Judge found that mother’s explanation was not right and that the boy had not turned the taps on, but the water had been there due to mum’s actions, though could not explain why she would have done this.  An interesting one, as Court of Appeal were split. One of the Court of Appeal judges felt that the trial Judge was right to have made the findings (Thorpe, the family judge), the other two felt he was plainly wrong, and the decision overturned.

 

Re ED and JD sub nom Devon County Council  – there was a comprehensive family medical history, including mother being a sufferer from Ehler-Danhloss syndrome   (I have heard it floated in almost every NAI case I’ve ever been in, but this is the first time I have read of anyone actually having it). There were nine rib fractures and subdural haemorrhages. The Court found that it would be surprising, given the evidence about the parents loving relationship with the children, if they had caused the injuries although it was possible, and concluded that  the LA had not proven the allegations of Non Accidental Injury

 

Re M (children) 2012     – I have blogged about this one before, it is the case where the child suffered what were described as ‘spectacular’ head injuries, to the point where the eminent experts involved could only pull up one point of comparison, being a man who had walked into moving helicopter rotor blades. The Court found that the head injuries, being inexplicable could not be said to have been caused by the parents, and thus that the rib fractures (where there was no medical doubt about them being NAI in causation) could not be safely said to have been caused by the parents.

 

 

Re M (A child) 2012  – 8 separate bruises on the arm of a child who was just weeks old. The medical opinion was NAI, the Court considered that the parents had also been dishonest in their evidence and made the findings. The Court of Appeal overturned this, considering that although the parents had not provided an explanation which the medical experts considered could be consistent with an accidental explanation, it would be a reversal of the burden of proof to then move to a conclusion that this meant the injury was non-accidental.

 

London Borough of Sutton v G 2012    – seven week old child collapsed, and had previously suffered burns. The Court had mixed medical evidence and accepted the conclusion of the experts who said that the collapse and injuries were due to an obstruction of airways rather than any non-accidental explanation and the parents were exonerated.

 

 

And on the flip-side, and this is the first one I have hit upon on this unscientific trawl of reported cases  – I know that there have been others, the other Ricket cases amongst them, so my trawl has been unscientific     

 

Re C (a Child) 2012 – where a Judge made findings, amidst competing medical evidence, that a mother had picked up her baby and shaken the baby in hospital following an admission for an earlier trauma. The Court of Appeal considered that the finding was ‘surprising’ but not plainly wrong.

 

 

Re A A 2012  – the Local Authority had not proved that a mother had killed two previous children, although did satisfy the Court that the threshold was met on chronic neglect. There was some medical evidence about a particular gene that the mother had which might have accounted for the death of the children.

 

Islington v Al Alas Wray 2012  – which you all know very well by now, the Court determining that the injuries were as a result of rickets brought about by Vitamin D deficiency.

 

 

Another one which made the findings despite contested medical evidence

 

Re L (Children) 2011   – the Judge made findings that the deaths of two children were due to deliberate actions by the mother, not to cardiac arrest, and although the medical evidence was mixed, the Court of Appeal upheld the decision. Where there was any uncertainty in the medical or scientific field a judge’s appraisal and confidence in the parent’s credibility was crucial to the outcome.

 

A County Council v Mother and Father 2011   (The Mostyn J case previously blogged about)   – the injuries were severe and peculiar, resulting in death to one child. The Judge was unhappy with both the medical explanations for the injuries and the parents account, and effectively found that neither were accurate but that the LA had thus not satisfied the burden of proof.   [Still not sure why that one didn’t get appealed]

 

Re LR (A Child) 2011  – cuts and burns to an 8 year old, the Court found that they were self-inflicted, despite medical evidence being doubtful that this was the case and that there had been no documented case of such injuries being self-inflicted by a child of this age, Court of Appeal upholding the decision of the initial judge.

 

Re R (A child) 2011  – Hedley J. [The ‘we are fearfully and wonderfully made’ case]

 

 Leg fracture to a seven month old child, following an admission aged 3 months to hospital for subdural haematomas. Judge heard the medical evidence that both were NAI, and determined that there might be an organic cause for the head injury that were not yet known to medical science. Hedley J then went on to say that notwithstanding the inherent unlikeliness of the leg fracture having been incurred accidentally, that is what he found to have happened.  [This is an interesting case to read, to see precisely how a Judge finds that something he considers inherently unlikely was on the balance of probabilities more likely than not to have happened…]

 

 

 

 

 

 

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