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Shoe-throwing and Interim Care Order

Posted on July 31, 2015 by suesspiciousminds

 

This is a tricky case.  It involves an appeal to the Court of Appeal about the Judge’s making of an Interim Care Order in relation to four children aged between 8 and 2 1/2

 

Re W-J (children) 2015

http://www.familylawweek.co.uk/site.aspx?i=ed146039

The mother in the case has what appears to be a form of personality disorder.  She accepts that there are times when she is utterly unable to control her temper and can fly into an unmanageable rage. Generally during these rages, she takes it out on inanimate objects.  She describes that the things that can set off these rages can be very trivial, giving the example of someone eating a packet of crisps loudly.

 

 

3…In short terms, from time to time she loses control of her behaviour, loses her temper, and the trigger for this is often a trivial matter which would not affect other people. On one occasion, for example, she describes losing her self control simply because she was irritated by the noise of someone eating a packet of crisps.

4. When she does lose control, she behaves in a physically violent way, normally towards inanimate objects, utensils in the kitchen, other matters of that sort. Sometimes she can detect the onset of these symptoms and make arrangements for the children, if they are at home, to go outside the house or go to be with someone else. On other occasions she is not able to have such foresight and it is plain from what the children have said that they have witnessed the distressing spectacle of their mother behaving in this way

 

Whilst that must be distressing and upsetting, what prompted the proceedings was that on two occasions, things went further than that.

 

what led to the proceedings being issued by the local authority were two instances relatively close together where the children reported on separate occasions being injured as a result of the mother’s behaviour. The first occurred on 2 February 2015, when the mother threw a shoe and it hit one of the older children. She accepted that and she indeed accepted a caution at the police station as a result of that behaviour. She accepted that she had thrown the shoe and thrown it at the child but she asserted that she was not deliberately intending to hurt him. She said she had lost control. The second occasion on 20 March 2015 was when the mother’s foot came into contact with the 7 year old girl. The judge heard some evidence about that. The mother accepted that, physically, her foot came into contact with her daughter but was not accepting that this was deliberately in order to cause injury. The child nevertheless was injured, albeit not very seriously. Following the second of those two outbursts, the local authority issued the proceedings.

 

What the Court had to do at that interim care order hearing was to determine whether the test for separation had been made out, and whether the risks could be managed in another way, applying the least interventionist principle.

 

Three of the children were found placements within the family, which were a decent compromise. That left one child, T, and a decision had to be taken about whether she could stay with mother, somewhere, or go into foster care.

There is a law geek point about whether the Court could have made an injunction under the Human Rights Act 1998 to make the LA manage the risk by keeping mother and child together.  The Court of Appeal closed this down by saying that it wasn’t sufficiently argued before the Judge to be an appeal point, so it is not resolved  (for my part, I think that the order that the Court can make in that regard is the straightforward Interim Supervision Order OR to compel them to place in residential assessment, a section 38(6) direction, and there’s no need to monkey around with esoteric HRA injunctions, but there may be a better case where the point really does arise)

 

10. In the course of the robust and constructive representation that the mother had at the hearing provided by Ms Kochnari, her counsel who represented her before the judge and before this court, Ms Kochnari drew attention to the jurisdiction that the Family Court may have in certain circumstances under the Human Rights Act 1996 to grant an injunction requiring a local authority to take a particular course of action. That jurisdiction in part is based upon, obviously, the wording of the Act itself but also decisions of this court, in particular Re: H (Children) [2011] EWCA Civ 1009 and a decision of the High Court: Re: DE (A child) [2014] EWFC 6. In short terms, Ms Kochnari’s submission was that the judge should grant an injunction requiring the local authority to keep the mother and child together, leaving it up to the local authority how that should be achieved.

11. That describes the position of the parties, mother and local authority, before the judge. The children’s guardian has plainly given this matter a great deal of anxious consideration. Both the guardian and the judge (and it is particularly important to stress that this was the judge’s perspective) saw the value for young T, particularly at the age she currently has reached, in remaining together with her mother. They have a good attachment and it would be seen as a detriment to that attachment, and a detriment to that important aspect of her best interests, for mother and child to be separated for any significant period at this juncture of her life.

12. But the question was how a maintenance of maternal care could be achieved. The guardian indicated that she would support a placement of the mother and child together in a foster home or some other form of residential accommodation if that could be achieved. The judge agreed with the guardian. The judge apparently said during the course of submissions that “heaven and earth” should be moved by the local authority to try to find a suitable placement and indeed an hour and a half or so was allowed during the course of the court day for the local authority to make enquiries. Those enquiries failed to identify any placement on the local authority’s books that could provide a mother and child placement at that stage. The local authority, however, took a more principled stand in addition to the practical difficulty of finding a particular placement. Their submission to the judge was that it was simply inappropriate to consider a mother and child foster home for this sort of case, this sort of case being one in which there is no real concern about the mother’s ability to provide day to day, hour to hour ordinary parenting, the concern being about her mental well being and the local authority indicated that it would be difficult to find a foster carer who would be prepared to accept the risk of having an adult, namely the mother, in the foster home when what is said about her behaviour is being said and is being said in the current period of time.

13. So the judge did not have an option before him for a mother and baby placement if he was to make an interim care order.

 

That left a rather stark choice

1. Grant the ICO and separate T from mother

2. Make no order / ISO and the child remains with mother at home

Or

3. Make no order, but adjourn for fuller enquiries about a placement that might have allowed a section 38(6) application for residential assessement to get off the ground.

 

The Court of Appeal set out why option 3, the adjournment, was not feasible

 

20. Dealing with the question of adjournment, the position before the judge is not altogether plain. It is clear that Ms Kochnari invited the judge in her closing submissions to afford more time for a more comprehensive search to be undertaken. She, in her submissions to us, urges us to interpret that as being really a request for the judge to consider adjourning the case for a period of a day or more to allow the sort of search that has now been undertaken to be conducted. The judge may have interpreted it simply as a matter of a further short time. For my part, given no doubt (although we have not got information about this) that that submission was made late during the course of the court day because this process will have taken up most of the court day, a request for more time almost inevitably meant more time when office hours are open and therefore another day, so in Ms Kochnari’s favour I assume that was the import of her submission to the judge.

21. But, in my judgment, the judge had to face up to the application before him and he did so without any consideration that another day or two could change the landscape and produce a firmed up and clear alternative for him to consider. He, with the reluctance that the choice of words that he used in his judgment clearly demonstrates, considered that it simply was not safe for this child to be at home with the mother for any period of time after the day on which he was giving judgment. In my view, he was entirely justified in coming to that view. I have referred to the psychiatric evidence, such as it was, that was available to him. He had evidence of the two recent episodes where the mother’s behaviour had flared up to the detriment of the children. A factor that I have not mentioned is that the older children had indicated a clear wish not to return to their mother’s care. He will have understood that for children, even if they were not physically injured by any particular deterioration in the mother’s behaviour, simply to watch their mother, the person upon whom they relied, behaving in this way, will have been totally bewildering and frightening. The judge did expressly take account of the fact that the older children had been able to be protected by the actions of the local authority because they had spoken up, they had gone to school or they had gone to other carers and said that their mother had behaved in the way that is now established she had behaved. But young T, aged two and a half would not be in a position to blow the whistle, as it were, on any such behaviour.

22. The final factor, and to my mind it is the crucial factor, is that it is impossible for an outsider to predict whether the mother will or will not flare up at any particular moment of any particular day. It is not a risk that can be predicted, contained or controlled, either by the mother or by any outside agency.

23. With all of those factors in mind, the judge was, in my view, entirely justified in saying that the risk was not one that could be taken in T’s best interests and immediate separation was required. So, even on the basis that a fully formed application for an adjournment had been made, in my view the judge’s decision not to adjourn but to make the order that day could not be said to be wrong and indeed on his analysis of the evidence it would seem hard to justify an alternative conclusion.

 

 

What could, perhaps, have been done but that wasn’t expressly considered here was for the Judge to make a short order – say a week, to allow that search for an alternative placement to take place and then revisit if there was any way to safely manage mother and child together.

 

The Court of Appeal, whilst acknowledging how difficult a situation this was and expressing hope that a longer term solution to mother’s difficulties might be found so that the other very good aspects of her parenting could prevail, were driven to conclude that the Judge’s decision to make an Interim Care Order was not only not wrong but actively right.

 

27. We are therefore left with the judge’s decision to make the interim care order in the circumstances that he did. This is a worrying case. I explained the basis of the worry at the very beginning of this short judgment. It is a case that will require very careful evaluation by the authorities and by the court over the course of the next 2 or 3 months as material is prepared for a final hearing. Crucial will be a full psychiatric assessment of the mother’s underlying mental health difficulties. At the end of the case, a judgment will have to be made as to the long term welfare of these children and as part of that judgment the many positives that can be said about this mother will come into play. But all that the judge was doing and, all that we are contemplating, is making a decision about the child’s welfare for the very short term under the interim order. In that context, important though the decision is, I regard the judge’s determination as being unremarkable. It was a decision made carefully by a judge on the correct legal test, supported by the evidence and one which amply was justified by the welfare of this young child. 

 

I’m sure that all of us would wish this mother well for the future and hope that a solution can be found that would let her parent in the way that she would wish to and be free of what must be a terrible inability to control those outbursts.

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An answer to an important question you didn’t know you had

Posted on June 4, 2014 by suesspiciousminds

 

 

 

The High Court in Re A Father v SBC 2014 have answered a very important question, albeit one that probably hadn’t fluttered across most people’s consciousness

If a child is at home under a Care Order, and the Local Authority want to use their powers to remove, can the parents obtain a s8 Human Rights Act injunction to stop them?

http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWFC/HCJ/2014/6.html

 

[All underlining, as ever, as mine for emphasis]
As the High Court points out, the remedy ordinarily for a parent if the LA want to remove a child once a Care Order has been made is either an application to Discharge the Care Order or a judicial review, neither of which are that easy to get off the ground. And an application to discharge the care order won’t stop the LA removing in the interim.

The parents in this case made their application to discharge the care order, but knowing that the Local Authority proposed to remove the child before the case would be heard also made an application for an injunction under s8 of the Human Rights Act that would have prevented the removal.

They referred to the decision of the Court of Appeal in Re H (Children) 2011, in which a Judge granted an interim care order but ruled that removal of the child under that order would be a breach of the child’s article 8 right to private and family life. The Court of Appeal upheld that and said further that if the Judge had gone on to make the section 8 HRA injunction prohibiting removal there would have been jurisdiction for her to do so. This was, a very short judgment and the s8 HRA issue is dealt with very briefly, and in of course the context in that case that the Judge had already decided that it would be a breach of the child’s human rights to remove the child.

http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2011/1009.html
The Court in this case at first instance refused to make the injunction and did not consider that it had jurisdiction to do so, given that the LA were exercising a lawful power.
In his judgment, DJ Goddard recorded that the local authority had confirmed that the situation was not an emergency, although the problems were escalating. The judge continued:

“Father applied to discharge the order of 7th November 2012 and he is entitled to make an application and be heard on it. I do not feel that it is improper of me to give my view on the likelihood of success of this application as it plays on my decision. In my view, it is extremely unlikely that he will succeed to discharge the order.”
The judge then recorded that he had suggested that an injunction was the appropriate remedy and referred to the case or Re H. He then continued

“I am being asked to glean the arguments from Re H and apply them to this situation, to import injunctive relief rights into this case to prevent D being removed tomorrow. I have tremendous sympathy for the parents. D has lived with them since birth, they both have difficulties, and they have received lots of support. They were both properly represented and both have consented to the order of 7th November 2012. They never appealed this order. What I am being asked to do by the father’s solicitor, who argued very strongly for the parents, is to, in effect, go behind that order.
In the absence of the local authority agreeing to give some breathing space and time, I cannot go behind that order. In some ways I wish I had the power to do so. I wish I could persuade the local authority to grant further breathing space as there is no emergency event which has precipitated the local authority wanting to take D tomorrow. They say that the progress they hoped for 15 months ago has just not happened. In the absence of me being able to persuade the local authority to agree to such a window, I cannot grant injunctive relief. There will still be a hearing to deal with the application to discharge. My present view is the father’s application will not be successful.

With a lot of reluctance, I have to dismiss the application for an injunction. I cannot see that I can do anything else. In practice, in accordance with the order of 7th November 2012, and in line with the care plan, D will be removed tomorrow.”

He therefore refused the application for an injunction and also refused an application for permission to appeal. He granted the application for a recovery order under s.50.

On appeal, the High Court, in the form of Baker J, took a different view on the Court’s jurisdiction to make a s8 injunction in these circumstances, and went back to remarks that the House of Lords had made in the notorious ‘starred care plan’ case

It follows therefore, as confirmed by Lord Nicholls of Birkenhead in Re S (Minors) (Care Order: Implementation of Care Plan): Re W (Minors) (Care Order: Adequacy of Care Plan).[2002] UKHL 10 [2002] 1 FLR 815 paragraph 49, that

“if a local authority conducts itself in a manner which infringes the article 8 rights of a parent or child, the court may grant appropriate relief on the application of a victim of the unlawful act.”
It is true that Lord Nicholls added, at paragraph 62:

“one would not expect proceedings to be launched under s.7 of the HRA 1998 until any other appropriate remedial routes have first been explored.”

 

Baker J made it plain that jurisdiction to make a s8 HRA injunction existed and could have been used in this case (pointing out that the other remedial routes theoretically available weren’t appropriate)

 

 

 

In this case I have sympathy for the district judge. It was he, not any of the parties, who first suggested that injunctive relief might be the appropriate remedy. He was then referred to only one case – Re H, supra – which is a brief report of an appeal against a circuit judge’s decision that she did not have jurisdiction to grant an injunction under s.8 HRA to restrain the local authority from removing a child under an interim care order. Before the Court of Appeal, the local authority conceded that the judge had misdirected herself. As a result of that concession, the court did not consider the jurisdiction in any detail. I do not think that the district judge in this case would have derived much assistance from that authority. He was then told that the parties had agreed that there was jurisdiction in the case before him to grant an injunction. Immediately afterwards, however, counsel for the local authority asserted that no injunction should be granted because removing the child would not be unlawful as human rights had been considered at the time the care order was made and upon the making of that order the responsibility for the child was removed from court and placed with the local authority. With respect to counsel then instructed for the local authority, that is not an accurate summary of the law. In fairness, I should record that she too was at a disadvantage having had no notice of an application for an injunction prior to the hearing.

In the circumstances, it was perhaps not surprising that the district judge concluded that he did not have the power to stop the local authority removing D. But in reaching that conclusion, he was in my judgment plainly wrong. He did have the power to grant an injunction, as has been clear since the House of Lords decision in Re S: Re W, supra.

It is extremely unfortunate that he was led into this error because it seems clear that, had he realised that he had the power to grant an injunction, he would have done so. Up to that point, D had always lived with his parents. The local authority had conceded that the circumstances did not amount to an emergency, and the judge said that he wished that he had the power to order the local authority to “give some breathing space and time”.

Baker J also drew together some observations of other Courts on the onerous decision-making process for a Local Authority in this type of situation (see particularly his reference to Re G below)

At paragraph 45 of Re G, Munby J spelt out the local authority’s obligations in clear terms:

“In a case such as this, a local authority, before it can properly arrive at a decision to remove children from their parents, must tell the parents (preferably in writing) precisely what it is proposing to do. It must spell out (again in writing) the reasons why it is proposing to do so. It must spell out precisely (in writing) the factual matters it is relying on. It must give the parents a proper opportunity to answer (either orally and/or in writing as the parents wish) the allegations being made against them. And it must give the parents a proper opportunity (orally and/or in writing as they wish) to make representations as to why the local authority should not take the threatened steps. In short, the local authority must involve the parents properly in the decision-making process. In particular the parents (together with their representatives if they wish to be assisted) should normally be given the opportunity to attend at, and address, any critical meeting at which crucial decisions are to be made.”

 

 

and also brought Re B-S et al to bear on the process – which is something that none of the previous authorities about LA exercising powers under a Care Order had been able to consider, as it hadn’t existed at the time.

 

To my mind, where a care order has been granted on the basis of a care plan providing that the child should remain at home, a local authority considering changing the plan and removing the child permanently from the family is obliged in law to follow the same approach. It must have regard to the fact that permanent placement outside the family is to be preferred only as a last resort where nothing else will do. Before making its decision, it must rigorously analyse all the realistic options, considering the arguments for and against each option. This is an essential process, not only as a matter of good practice, but also because the local authority will inevitably have to demonstrate its analysis in any court proceedings that follow the change of care plan, either on an application for the discharge of the care order or an application for placement order under the Adoption and Children Act 2002. This process of rigorous analysis of all realistic options should be an essential feature of all long-term planning for children. And, as indicated by Munby J in Re G, the local authority must fully involve the parents in its decision-making process.

While this process is being carried out, the child should remain at home under the care order, unless his safety and welfare requires that he be removed immediately. This is the appropriate test when deciding whether the child should be removed under an interim care order, pending determination of an application under s.31 of the Children Act: Re L-A (Children) [2009] EWCA Civ 822. The same test should also apply when a local authority’s decision to remove a child placed at home under a care order has led to an application by the parents to discharge the order and the court has to decide whether the child should be removed pending determination of the discharge application. As set out above, under s.33(4) of the 1989, the local authority may not exercise its powers under a care order to determine how a parent may exercise his or her parental responsibility for the child unless satisfied it is necessary to do so to safeguard or promote the child’s welfare. For a local authority to remove a child in circumstances where its welfare did not require it would be manifestly unlawful and an unjustifiable interference with the family’s Article 8 rights.
In submissions before the district judge, and before this court, it was argued on behalf of the local authority that its removal of D from the family home was lawful simply by reason of the care order. That submission is fundamentally misconceived. The local authority’s removal of the child would only be lawful if necessary to safeguard or promote his welfare. Any other removal, or threatened removal, of the child is prima facie unlawful and an interference of the Article 8 rights of the parents and child. In such circumstances, the parents are entitled to seek an injunction under s.8 of the HRA.

 

A lot of very important stuff there (as you can probably tell, because I’ve underlined nearly all of it)

1. The same threshold that applies to removing a child under an Interim Care Order (that the child’s safety requires immediate separation) applies to removal from home under a Care Order (unless you go through the process below)
2. The LA have to conduct the full-blown Re B-S analysis of the pros and cons of each option
3. The child should stay at home whilst that exercise is carried out – unless his safety requires immediate removal
4. The parents must be fully involved in the assessment and analysis process and their views taken into account – it almost reaches the point, pace Re G, of the LA holding something akin to a Meeting Before Action (how the funding would be triggered to get the parents legal representatives able to attend is a bit tricky)
5. A Court can make a s8 HRA injunction to prevent the removal if the parents challenge the removal and want the status quo to remain pending litigation of a discharge of care order application.

6. We don’t get to this bit just yet, but it is vital – unless the removal is because the child’s safety requires immediate separation, if an injunction is what it will take to make the LA desist from their plan of removal, an injunction SHOULD be made

 

As was pointed out to Baker J, care orders with children at home had been a fairly rare and unusual circumstance, but with these two factors :-

(a) The 26 week deadline meaning that cases are finished at an earlier stage and with residual doubts; and
(b) The Court of Appeal’s decision in Neath Port Talbot

The number of such cases has gone up and is likely to continue to go up. As the number of children at home under Care Orders go up, the number of children whom the Local Authority seek to remove under a Care Order goes up too. So this issue affects more and more children as time passes.

With that in mind then, the High Court gave guidance on how Courts should address such care plans in future (this stuff is HUGE)
To avoid the problems that have arisen in this case, the following measures should be taken in future cases.
(1) In every case where a care order is made on the basis of a care plan providing that a child should live at home with his or her parents, it should be a term of the care plan, and a recital in the care order, that the local authority agrees to give not less than fourteen days notice of a removal of the child, save in an emergency. I consider that fourteen days is an appropriate period, on the one hand to avoid unnecessary delay but, on the other hand, to allow the parents an opportunity to obtain legal advice.

(2) Where a care order has been granted on the basis of a care plan providing that the child should remain at home, a local authority considering changing the plan and removing the child permanently from the family must have regard to the fact that permanent placement outside the family is to be preferred only as a last resort where nothing else will do and must rigorously analyse all the realistic options, considering the arguments for and against each option. Furthermore, it must involve the parents properly in the decision-making process.

(3) In every case where a parent decides to apply to discharge a care order in circumstances where the local authority has given notice of intention to remove a child placed at home under a care order, the parent should consider whether to apply in addition for an injunction under s.8 of the HRA to prevent the local authority from removing the child pending the determination of the discharge application. If the parent decides to apply for an injunction, that application should be issued at the same time as the discharge application.

(4) When a local authority, having given notice of its intention to remove a child placed at home under a care order, is given notice of an application for discharge of the care, the local authority must consider whether the child’s welfare requires his immediate removal. Furthermore, the authority must keep a written record demonstrating that it has considered this question and recording the reasons for its decision. In reaching its decision on this point, the local authority must again inter alia consult with the parents. Any removal of a child in circumstances where the child’s welfare does not require immediate removal, or without proper consideration and consultation, is likely to be an unlawful interference with the Article 8 rights of the parent and child.

(5) On receipt of an application to discharge a care order, where the child has been living at home, the allocation gatekeeper at the designated family centre should check whether it is accompanied by an application under s.8 of HRA and, if not, whether the circumstances might give rise to such an application. This check is needed because, as discussed below, automatic legal aid is not at present available for such applications to discharge a care order, and it is therefore likely that such applications may be made by parents acting in person. In cases where the discharge application is accompanied by an application for an order under s.8 HRA, or the allocation gatekeeper considers that the circumstances might give rise to such an application, he or she should allocate the case as soon as possible to a circuit judge for case management. Any application for an injunction in these circumstances must be listed for an early hearing.

(6) On hearing an application for an injunction under s.8 HRA to restrain a local authority removing a child living at home under a care order pending determination of an application to discharge the care order, the court should normally grant the injunction unless the child’s welfare requires his immediate removal from the family home.

 

(Read the last bit again – the presumption is that the injunction should be granted UNLESS the LA are able to show that circumstances that would justify an immediate removal are made out)

I think that there is an argument that current Care Orders at home ought to be read as though that 14 day notice period save for emergencies is implicit in the care plan, given this authority. In all future cases, it needs to be explicit, and this is an issue that all professionals need to be alive to.
Funding is an issue for parents (compounded in this case because the father had been represented through the Official Solicitor in care proceedings, and thus making a HRA application on his own was clearly something that was beyond him, and he had been fortunate in having lawyers who were prepared to assist him pro-bono whilst waiting for the O/S to pick the case up.

this case has highlighted a further major problem. These parents face the prospect of losing their son permanently. If this prospect had arisen in the context of care proceedings, they would be entitled as of right to non-means tested legal aid. It is difficult to see why similar automatic public funding should not be available where the local authority proposes the removal of a child living at home under a care order and the parents apply to discharge that order and for an interim injunction under s.8 HRA. The justification for automatic public funding in care proceedings is the draconian nature of the order being claimed by the local authority. Where a local authority seeks to remove a child placed at home under a care order, the outcome of the discharge application may be equally draconian. Because this father is working, and earns a very low wage from which he has contributed to the support of his family, he, and possibly the mother, are disqualified from legal aid. Miss Fottrell and Miss Sprinz and their solicitors are at present acting pro bono. It is unfair that legal representation in these vital cases is only available if the lawyers agree to work for nothing.

This problem is compounded in this case because of the learning difficulties of the parties and in particular the father. I have made observations in other cases about the obligation on all professionals in the family justice system to address the particular difficulties experienced by parents suffering from learning difficulties – see Kent CC v A Mother and others [2011] EWHC 402 (Fam) and Wiltshire Council v N [2013] EWHC 3502 (Fam). A parent with learning difficulties who is not entitled to legal aid is at a very great disadvantage when seeking to stop a local authority removing his child.

On the basis of evidence at present available, it seems plain that the father lacks capacity to conduct litigation and therefore needs to be represented by a litigation friend. Such are the demands on the Official Solicitor’s time and resources that there is inevitably a delay in his deciding whether or not to accept instructions, and the fact that the father is not entitled to public funding adds to the complications. In this case, I hope that the Official Solicitor will give urgent consideration to accepting the invitation to act as litigation friend. The current system in which so much of the responsibility for representing parents who lack capacity falls on the shoulders and inadequate resources of the Official Solicitor is nearing breaking point.

I have drawn these concerns to the attention of the President of the Family Division. It may be that he considers that they are of sufficient importance to bring to the attention of the Family Justice Board and others responsible for the family justice system.

 

(As we know, the exceptional circumstances in which funding might be given under LASPO involve cases where failure to provide funding would result in a person’s human rights being breached – the High Court here have set up a situation in which the child’s article 8 rights would be breached, and given illustrations of how vital it is that parents are represented to fight those – as we know from Airey v Ireland, it is not sufficient for the State simply to say that the State has given a person rights, if the person can’t actually access them or exercise them. This is setting up a judicial review for the future, I suspect)

 

A key question here is, where does this leave Neath Port Talbot? If the major feature of a Care Order over a Supervision Order is the power for the LA to remove the child (or that implicit threat) and the power/threat is neutered, what on earth is the value of having a Care Order at home (other than duration – a Care Order can last until the child is 18, whereas a Supervision Order is limited to one year at a time, up to a maximum of three years)

For any Local Authority, they might as well have a Supervision Order and issue fresh care proceedings if they want to remove, as opposed to having a neutered Care Order.

 

An important case – I expect it to feature in the next view from the President.

 

 

 

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