During August, I attended a final hearing in a case I’d written about in May, when I’d said:
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.
Following that hearing, the LA, Cardiff Council, undertook a lot of constructive work with the grandparents who got some legal advice. The plan was then agreed that the child would continue to be placed with them, under a care order. So there wasn’t an application for special guardianship (yet). Their solicitor helpfully briefly explained this to me as we went in. I’d not been able to get any information about the case from the LA solicitor despite several requests since May. I thought this was odd, because the judge was full of praise for the high quality of the social work that had been done with the family since the case management hearing (CMH), so you’d imagine the LA would have been happy with publicity.
In care proceedings, the judge usually expects the LA lawyers to take the lead regarding transparency orders, as they are the applicants to court, although I would also approach lawyers for the other parties if I needed to see documents they had written. I’d not previously had any problem in getting responses from LA lawyers, although I know they’re hugely busy.
The care proceedings
For background details on the case, see my report in May. The child had been living with his grandparents for more than a year before the LA issued the care application. He’d gone to live there initially as a temporary measure while the LA was carrying out a child protection investigation because his mother wouldn’t agree to her partner leaving the family home while the investigation was ongoing. The concerns that her partner’s presence in the household was harmful to both mother and child were well-founded and the child was not returned. Matters drifted on, with the mother agreeing to the child being looked after under section 76 (Welsh equivalent of s 20 Children Act 1989) until she withdrew her agreement in April this year and the LA applied for a care order.
Following the CMH I’d attended in May, the grandparents and the Cafcass guardian were concerned that they might need more support from the LA than they would get as special guardians. They have been entitled to support as approved kinship foster carers for more than a year now. There are significant differences between the LA’s duties toward foster carers and special guardians mainly because parental responsibility (PR) is not shared with foster carers and they are paid financial allowances toward maintaining the child. Given the family dynamics here, it was agreed that the child and his grandparents still needed to be able to rely on the LA to exercise PR. The case summary refers to a contact safety plan and a plan to manage the child’s introduction to his biological father. The father wasn’t part of the LA’s original case about risks of harm but he hadn’t been part of the child’s life before proceedings and there was still some acrimony between the birth parents. Unfortunately, the child’s mother was still living with the violent partner.
The child was said to be happy with the plans; contact with his mother, supervised by the grandparents, was reported as progressing safely. He was yet to be introduced to his father, who had now been assessed as not posing a risk of harm, but this contact would need to be carefully supervised. The father had been considering applying for PR but his lawyer said he would at this stage just be applying for a declaration of parentage, so he would be on the record as the child’s biological father.
In these circumstances, the judge agreed that this one of the exceptional cases where a care order ‘at home’ is the best welfare decision. There is case law authority on this in Re DE (A Child) [2014] EWFC 6 and Re JW (Child at Home under Care Order) [2023] EWCA Civ 944. Technically, this may not look like a placement ‘at home’ in the sense of returning or leaving a child where he was at risk of harm, but he is staying in what’s been his real home for some time, and meanwhile there’s instability in his mother’s situation. The judge said she hoped that she would be able to discharge the care order in due course. (This will be when the child and his carers no longer need such intensive support, and special guardianship is the appropriate order.) The child had asked if he could come to court to meet the judge after the hearing, which she was happy to agree to.
Comment
It was noted that Week 26 since the LA issued care proceedings in this case would have been late October. The statistics will show that this application was concluded in good time. However, that statistic does not reflect the eight years this boy suffered in a dangerous household and the subsequent wait for his legal status to be assured.
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