The circumstances in this case may sound all too familiar to some readers. A child aged ten was terrified of his mother’s violent male partner and is now living with his grandparents. The local authority (LA) had applied for an interim care order (ICO). The good news is that the child is now settled with his grandparents and it’s likely they will apply for and be granted a special guardianship order.
This is an account of my attending a recent hearing as a legal blogger, with some comment on the context of a recent report on ‘Improving family court services for children’ which states that Wales has the lowest case duration figures, with average duration of 24 weeks for cases brought by local authorities, half that of London.
The evidence of harm
I didn’t know anything about the hearing I decided to attend that morning, apart from Courtserve telling me the night before that it was a case management hearing (CMH) listed for one and a half hours and that the categories identified by the public law codes were: neglect; physical abuse; emotional harm; and domestic abuse. However, from what I heard in court at the hearing and what I’ve read in the case summary and Cafcass report, all the harm is directly or indirectly caused by the man who lives with the child’s mother. They’d lived together, on and off, all of the child’s life, although this man is not his father. Over the whole ten years, there’d been a number of reports about the mother being controlled and attacked by her partner. She had on at least three occasions tried to separate from him, but then returned. The child’s name had been added to the Child Protection Register for two periods since 2017.
The hearing
As usual, the court had quite short notice of my attendance (because Courtserve details go online so late the previous day) but I had the opportunity to introduce myself to the grandparents and some other family members who’d come along in support in a waiting area. I explained my role as a legal blogger and what the judge was likely to say about me and about anonymisation. The court building layout is such that I would have had to wait with the mother and her lawyer in one part of the corridor (out of the question as they were in consultation) or with the extended family members, who had no lawyer to explain who I was.
The judge had drafted a Transparency Order and when we got in, no one objected to my presence or my reporting. The judge asked that I be given a copy of the LA case summary and the Cafcass report (more on this below) The child’s father was present with a barrister and the LA was represented by an in-house lawyer.
The LA lawyer explained to the court that there’d been developments since the mother had read the Cafcass report, as she now accepted that the child could not safely return to live with her and that he was happy living with her parents. Although she had been the subject of a parenting assessment quite some months ago, the LA didn’t plan a new assessment because, sadly, she hadn’t made progress in addressing the issues she knew about in that assessment and she had not been reliably keeping in contact with the child. (Current arrangements were for an hour every two weeks at a local contact centre.) She appeared to have no ongoing relationship with the child’s father (who didn’t have parental responsibility nor a relationship with the child) who wasn’t a part of the LA statement on the threshold about risks of harm for a care order. He’d been recently joined to the proceedings because he was now asking for contact with the child and was being assessed by the LA as to whether this would be in the child’s welfare. This would need to be handled very sensitively as the child didn’t know him.
The maternal grandparents were given party status by the court so that they could obtain legal advice on applying for special guardianship.
The Cafcass report
It’s not standard for a legal blogger to see what’s called a Cafcass ‘case initial analysis’ – although we can ask. However, the judge explained that she wanted me to read the report so the court could take the opportunity of being open and transparent about the amount of work that goes into cases like this at an early stage. She described the report as ‘incredibly thorough’ and was especially appreciative of the way the guardian had summarised her recommendations very clearly in the document. I noticed that the guardian had met the child, his mother and grandparents and spoken to the father by phone, all within one week, and filed her 16-page report a week before the hearing. That certainly looked efficient and helpful.
The report presented a clear picture of the child and his wishes and feelings. As well as being frightened of his mother’s cohabitee, he worries about her safety. The guardian agreed with the LA’s application for an ICO, with the child staying with his grandparents, and she made a number of recommendations about support for the mother to engage with services and a planned introduction between the child and his father. She had some concerns about the grandparents’ health and how much support the local authority would provide. She’d been quite critical of some of the history – the child had been living with his grandparents for three months before the local authority formalised this into a section 76 (equivalent of section 20 in England) placement and it was now nearly 18 months that he’d been with them. However she was positive about the child’s social worker who knew the child well.
Delays and timeliness in this case
The LA had issued its application some three weeks before this CMH. The hearing demonstrated the sort of tight case management since the PLO ‘refocus’ we’ve written about here. I agree with the judge’s positive comments on the amount of work that had been put in by professionals early in the case, but of course this was not early in the child’s life. The case summary showed that the child had moved to his grandparents at the end of 2023, and became looked after in early 2024. Although the LA then began the PLO pre-proceedings stage, they didn’t apply to court and it was a year later that the grandparents were approved as kinship foster carers. It appeared that the PLO process languished until the mother indicated a few weeks ago that she would withdraw her consent to the s 76 placement with her parents.
A tight timetable was set at this CMH for an issues resolution hearing/final hearing in August, with dates set in the interim for disclosure of a wide range of records, assessments, and documents to be filed, including details of a support plan for the child and grandparents. There was no dispute that the threshold of harm had been reached, and an ICO was made.
The LA lawyer made some references to the range of support the mother had been offered over the years and the Cafcass report contained further details of the domestic abuse and other services she had been referred to but not taken up. It appeared that the mother didn’t fully accept that she was a domestic abuse victim, although she had shortly before the hearing recognised that her son’s welfare and his own views meant it was best for him to live with his grandparents under a legal order. The judge made a point of acknowledging how hard this had been for her and said that no doubt she is receiving expert independent advice from her lawyer.
The case had become so much more manageable since it had been allocated at circuit judge level, that the judge said she would consider whether it should be transferred to magistrates.
I thought about this case in the context of a new report from the National Audit Office that presents a depressing picture of how long family court proceedings are taking, when the national averages are considered. The report groups together the major causes of delay as:
- Increased work required for each case, including more evidence reports being commissioned from experts and additional hearings per case – that was not happening in this case.
- lack of capacity i.e. shortage of social workers in LAs and Cafcass and shortage of judges – while this is true of the south east Wales court area as of the rest of England and Wales, there weren’t any direct references to lack of capacity. All the professionals at this CMH stage were negotiating very constructively to ensure the matter can now conclude as quickly as possible. However there had been some unexplained delays by the LA before they issued the court application.
- Administrative tasks being missed or performed inefficiently – it seems that one of the most recent delays was confusion about the LA policy on kinship care, which may have been either administrative error or lack of capacity.
- Applicants, especially litigants in person, not being adequately supported – in this case, the grandparents seemed well informed, but it had taken nearly 18 months since they took their grandson in, for them to become entitled to legal representation in court.
The 26-week deadline in this case will not occur until October, but a final hearing is anticipated in August. The relatively short duration of the court proceedings seems to be due to a number of factors, including pro-active case management, but also the amount of of work having been undertaken by the the LA before they applied to court.
Conclusion
We hope to attend the final hearing in this case, and further report on other care cases which have similar features.
We have a small favour to ask!
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