by Ruth Green
It’s mid-morning, and a gaggle of barristers file into a hearing room clutching laptops and case notes. Two parents, flanked by their interpreters, take their seats.
I arrived on the second day of the father’s evidence in a case that arose after the couple’s four-month-old baby was presented to A&E with a head injury, initially blamed on a fall. The mother later said one of the older children had dropped the child.
The local authority applied to the court for an interim care order for the infant after medical professionals raised suspicions over whether the injury had been caused accidentally, and inconsistencies were found in the family members’ accounts of what happened.
The challenge for the judge is to work out who is telling the truth. This isn’t simple with such a complex cast of family members, medical professionals and other experts involved. It’s also one reason why the case was permitted an extension beyond the standard 26-week limit normally granted to family courts to complete care proceedings.
After hearing all the evidence, the judge found that the mother had inflicted the injury and the father was not responsible. The child, although now recovered, has already spent over a year in care. The court already sanctioned the removal of one older sibling to care after he was found unattended outside of the family home. Interim care orders were also being sought for the other older children.
The court has endorsed some safety work for the parents, but due to its complexity, the case has still not reached a conclusion and is now due to stretch into the new year.
It’s expected that all the children could eventually be allowed to return home, but a rushed decision – rather than the right one – could prove detrimental to the children’s welfare.
Later in the week, I stumbled across another care case, where a mother with a history of drug and alcohol addiction is fighting for the return of her three youngest children after they were placed in foster care.
To make matters worse, the local authority was unable to find a local placement to accommodate the three siblings together, meaning they’d been placed out of area, at least 140 miles away.
As demand for foster care increases, recent research by the County Councils Network shows that increasingly, children are being placed more than 20 miles away from their local area, school and family.
Aside from the cost – out of area placements can cost as much as four times more than placing them with a local carer – the court heard that the location had made visits and contact with the children’s mothers, fathers and older siblings extremely challenging on a practical level. The situation had also been exacerbated by the local authority’s overly bureaucratic approach to funding contact.
Her Honour, Judge Case, commended the mother for her efforts to give up drugs and alcohol over the past 10 months but maintained that a “more sustained period” of recovery was needed before returning the children to her care.
However, the judge acknowledged that as the children were settled and the parents were content with the placement, the foster care arrangement should remain in place. She even took the unorthodox step of calling on the local authority not to relocate the children back to the local area purely “for financial reasons”.
She also urged the mother to reconsider talking therapies – both re-exploring options on the NHS or, if funding was made available, to seek help privately.
But speaking to one barrister, I discovered there are still wide gaps in therapeutic support for parents battling issues from drug addiction to mental health issues like anxiety and depression. “I deal with clients all the time who have psychological problems and really need mental health support, but the access to help just isn’t there,” she says.
Amidst the custody battles, allegations of child abduction, neglect, domestic abuse and even forced marriage protection orders, my sobering week in the court also offered some tiny glimmers of hope.
In one case, a father, himself a former alcoholic, was finally reunited with his son after 12 years. Although Her Honour Judge Case conceded that the boy had “survived some of the worst experiences in a broken care system”, she commended his “resilience” and, given the father’s recovery, said she was “entirely satisfied” in discharging the care order.
Criticism of the family courts – and calls for greater transparency – are not new. And maybe in Manchester, there’s more to prove. It was only last year that tenacious journalist Louise Tickle succeeded in appealing to the High Court to overturn one judge’s decision to exclude another journalist from a hearing.
Although many barristers are still taken aback by journalists turning up to court, all the ones I speak to say that more transparency is good for everyone and the more people that know about the courts’ work, the better.
Judges are, quite rightly, given the often very serious and personal nature of the cases they hear, prohibited from speaking publicly about cases. But perhaps more needs to be done to spread the word about what good the courts are doing, too.
The court regularly holds adoption celebration hearings to mark the final legal part of the adoption process. Usually presided over by the judge who’s handled the child’s care proceedings, one adopter tells me the ceremony is rounded off with donated teddies and other toys and photos are taken of the child with their new family to mark the occasion.
Over the past decade, more than 150 children who have gone through family court proceedings in Manchester have also been invited to attend the court as part of a Children’s Access Tour. After watching a play performed by solicitors and barristers, they meet the judge and barristers for a Q&A. “It gives them a better understanding of court procedure,” says Lynda Howard, clerk to HHJ Singleton KC. It may not sound like much, but it’s another step forward for open justice.
Blog post published 13th January 2025
This is the second part of a three-part series. For the other posts visit our main family court blog page
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