Cambridge Family Law Practice

A family court judge has published a special, additional judgement to highlight procedural failings in care proceedings concerning a two-month-old baby.

In March of this year, Her Honour Judge Madeleine Reardon made an ‘interim care order’ for the infant, referred to as ‘V’, meaning the baby would go into the care system on an immediate basis.

She then explained that:

“The purpose of this further, written judgment is to highlight some fundamental errors made in the preparation and presentation of this case. The principles that should have been applied are, or should be, well known.”

The target of her second judgement were institutional rather than individual failings, Judge Reardon stressed.

V’s parents, M and F, had two older children, born when they lived in the central London borough of Tower Hamlets. These children had both had been the subject of care proceedings. The mother’s legal team challenged the local authority’s arguments for the two children being taken into care, during an extended 13-day hearing before Judge Reardon.

In that case, Her Honour concluded that:

“…neither parent would be able to care for the children, together or separately, and that unless there was a family member available to care for them (which at that stage was a possibility, but no more) this was a case where nothing else other than adoption would do.”

The Court of Appeal refused to grant the parents permission to appeal, and the two children were placed with a relative overseas. Meanwhile, they moved from Tower Hamlets to the London Borough of Newham. At the beginning of this year, Newham social workers became aware that the mother was pregnant for a third time, and asked their Tower Hamlet colleagues for case files relating to the first two children.

After examining the files, they quickly applied for the interim care order and this case was also allocated to Judge Reardon because she was available and because of her previous experience with the family. She soon discovered that Tower Hamlets had provided the Newham social workers with an incomplete set of documents – in particular, her judgement in the previous cases was completely absent from the documents.

“I read the initial social work statement and the local authority’s interim threshold document on the day the proceedings were issued. It was immediately obvious that they presented a misleading impression of the history.”

She compared a social work statement compiled with by Newham with the findings of her own earlier judgement. The social workers claimed, for example, that the mother had missed multiple social care appointments, had threatened to kill herself in hospital, and had refused testing for an apparent infection while pregnant. But the Judge insisted that these claims were contradicted by other evidence: that she could, for example, control her emotions. She disputed the accuracy of the infection claim and insisted that the local authority had not provided the mother with the support she needed as a parent with a learning disability.

The authority claimed the father’s parenting abilities had not been properly assessed. Judge Reardon explained these arguments were a repetition of claims previously made by the father’s legal representatives, and stressed they had already been dismissed in her judgement.

“When the hearing commenced I raised the issue of the missing judgment. None of the advocates had seen it.”

She explained that:

“…although the March 2021 judgment was missing it must have been obvious from those papers that a judgment had been delivered… The information contained in my March 2021 judgment was therefore available to all of the parties, or at least should have been.”

Judge Reardon continued:

“If the [interim care order] hearing had been listed before a different Judge, as could easily have happened, there would have been no one in the courtroom (other than the parents) who actually knew what findings had and had not been made in the previous proceedings, and what view the court had taken of the expert evidence. At best, the court would have been presented with an unnecessarily conflicted and confusing picture. At worst, a decision of huge significance to V and his parents could have been taken on the basis of information that was simply wrong.”

She concluded:

“The unpredictable nature of family cases means that the occasional ineffective hearing is unavoidable. That makes it all the more important that professionals (both social workers and lawyers) do not compound the problem by rendering hearings ineffective through a lack of proper preparation.”

Adam Moghadas, one of the partners here at Cambridge Family Law Practice, notes that “this case highlights some of the issues within not only the care system but also the wider family law court system. At the heart of the problem is undoubtedly a lack of public funding. Whilst many people – professionals and the parties – will suffer as a result, it is clearly the children with whom we are most concerned.”

Read the full judgement here.