CtL and CmL (Children) (Welfare Hearing: Expert Report), Re

In care and placement proceedings, children’s pressing need for permanence, security and stability may make adoption preferable to long-term fostering, even where direct contact with birth relatives is desired. The court must assess welfare throughout the children’s lives and determine whether adoption is necessary and proportionate in the circumstances. It should not require the local authority to search only for adopters willing to provide ongoing face-to-face contact where that condition would materially impede family finding. Expert evidence must address the questions for which it is commissioned, engage with established findings, and provide focused analysis rather than extensive narrative.

The judgment concluded care proceedings concerning two siblings aged seven and four. Earlier fact-finding and welfare decisions had ruled out their return to either parent. A consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist was instructed to advise whether long-term fostering or adoption would better meet the children’s welfare needs and to make recommendations concerning contact.

The expert recommended long-term fostering, while the local authority, social worker, adoption specialist and Children’s Guardian supported adoption. The central issues were the children’s need for permanence, the weight to be given to the expert evidence, whether parental consent to placement should be dispensed with, and whether prospective adopters should be required to accept ongoing direct contact.

1. Outcome. Care and placement orders were made. The parents’ consents to placement were dispensed with, and the local authority’s adoption plans were endorsed.
2. The children’s overriding need was to move from short-term foster care to a permanent family in which they could experience security, stability, belonging and uninterrupted care throughout their childhood. Adoption offered those advantages. Long-term fostering carried continuing risks associated with placement disruption and the children remaining looked-after for many years.
3. The expert report was given little weight. It substantially exceeded the permitted length, contained extensive unnecessary narrative, failed adequately to engage with the earlier findings and did not analyse the comparative advantages of adoption and fostering. The recommendations were therefore unsustainable. Expert evidence in welfare proceedings should be focused on the questions asked, based on the established evidential framework, and directed to analysis and opinion.
4. Having considered the welfare checklist in Adoption and Children Act 2002, s 1(4), the judge was satisfied that adoption best served the children’s welfare throughout their lives. Interference with the mother’s and children’s rights under Article 8 was necessary and proportionate because their welfare required it and no lesser intervention would adequately secure their safety and development.
5. The court rejected a requirement that the family-finding team search expressly for adopters willing to provide continuing face-to-face contact. Such a condition could make the search materially more difficult or impossible. Informal enquiries about contact could be made, and any positive response considered by the local authority and Independent Reviewing Officer. The parents’ contact was appropriately to reduce over time.