C (A Child)

In care proceedings, the court must decide the child’s welfare on the evidence and must confront the real alternatives before it. Where a supported and time-limited rehabilitation assessment offers a realistic prospect of the child being brought up by natural parents, that option must be properly evaluated against immediate removal and adoption.

Judicial doubts must have an evidential foundation. A judge should not diminish properly reasoned expert evidence merely because an expert revised an opinion after a joint experts’ meeting. Reasons for rejecting rehabilitation must be adequate, convincing and directed to the actual evidence. The appellate court may exercise the discretion afresh where the lower court’s reasoning is inadequate or flawed.

Care proceedings concerned D, an eight-month-old child. The local authority sought a care order leading swiftly to placement for adoption. The parents opposed the application, and the children’s guardian proposed an interim care order followed by a closely supervised, four-month probationary rehabilitation assessment.

After a five-day hearing, HHJ Ibbotson made the care order. The parents and guardian appealed, challenging the treatment of expert evidence, the assessment of family support, the acceptance of late allegations concerning the father, and the judge’s reasons for rejecting rehabilitation. The central issue was whether the immediate care-and-placement route was justified, or whether a short, carefully managed assessment with the parents should first be attempted.

1. Appeal allowed. The care order was set aside and replaced with an interim care order in favour of the local authority. The case was remitted for urgent directions concerning the proposed probationary assessment.
2. The judge had materially mischaracterised the choice before him. The issue was not simply care order or no care order. It was whether the child should immediately be placed outside the biological family or should have a measured, closely monitored opportunity to remain with the parents. The proposed assessment was limited in duration and would not create unacceptable delay if rehabilitation failed.
3. The treatment of the expert evidence was flawed. An expert’s substantial change of opinion after discussion with a jointly instructed expert was not, without more, a principled reason to reject or diminish the evidence. Such revision may result from proper professional debate.
4. The judge also gave insufficient weight to the guardian’s reports of the mother’s counsellor and the grandparents. The absence of direct oral evidence did not justify disregarding professionally assessed evidence, particularly where the witnesses had not been called for reasons outside the parents’ control and no opportunity had been given to address the concern.
5. Judicial doubts about parental cooperation and the grandparents’ capacity required an evidential foundation. The evidence of cooperation during the interlocutory period, and the guardian’s positive assessment, called those doubts into question. The late allegations against the father also required more critical scrutiny in light of the contemporaneous records.
6. Thorpe LJ concluded that the care order rested on reasoning that was inadequate or flawed. The Court of Appeal therefore exercised its discretion afresh, having regard to the child’s welfare as the paramount consideration. Jackson LJ agreed.

• Court of Appeal (Civil Division): Appeal from York County Court allowed. The care order was set aside and replaced by an interim care order; the case was remitted for further management.
• York County Court: HHJ Ibbotson made a care order after contested care proceedings.