M & Ors v Suffolk County Council

In proceedings concerning permanent placement, the court must evaluate each realistic welfare option holistically and assess whether adoption is proportionate. Adoption requires the conclusion that nothing else will meet the child’s needs.

A judgment predating later guidance need not adopt a prescribed structure if, read fairly and as a whole, it answers the essential welfare and proportionality questions. A judge may prefer one professional assessment over another after considering their respective purposes, factual foundations and methodologies, and after hearing their authors.

A mother and the maternal grandparents appealed against care and placement orders concerning two young children. The children had entered foster care amid concerns about the mother’s mental health, domestic violence and the parents’ capacity to protect them.

The grandparents had received a positive family-and-friends fostering assessment but a negative special guardianship assessment. The county court preferred the latter and concluded that they could neither protect the children from emotional harm nor offer the permanence required.

The appeal asked whether the judge’s findings supported that conclusion and whether he had adequately compared the realistic options and evaluated the proportionality of adoption.

1. The appeals were dismissed. Ryder LJ, with whom Vos and Tomlinson LJJ agreed, held that the county court’s welfare analysis and proportionality evaluation were neither wrong nor insupportable.

2. The proceedings were quasi-inquisitorial. Applying the overriding objective and active case management under the Family Procedure Rules 2010, a judge may identify and decide the key issues necessary to determine the ultimate questions without resolving every factual or opinion issue raised in the evidence.

3. The judge’s findings about the risks presented by the mother were supported by specific examples and were not open to challenge. The judge properly examined whether the grandparents could protect the children from those risks. He was entitled to find that they minimised the risks, would struggle to maintain boundaries against the mother and regarded their care as temporary rather than permanent.

4. A judge faced with differing professional or expert opinions may examine their factual foundations, methodology and purpose, prefer one opinion, or combine them. Here, the special guardianship assessment focused more directly on permanence and substitute parenting than the fostering assessment. The judge considered both reports, understood their different purposes and heard both authors. His preference was therefore permissible.

5. Although the judgment did not use the structured comparison described in Re B-S (Children) [2013] EWCA Civ 1146, substance prevailed over form because it predated that guidance. Read fairly and as a whole, it addressed the realistic options of care by the mother, care by the grandparents and adoption. It did not commit the linear error identified in Re G (A Child) [2013] EWCA Civ 965.

6. The judge recognised the imperative favouring family placement, the advantages of birth-family life and the need to avoid a simple comparative best-interests exercise. By asking whether anything other than adoption would suffice, he conducted the proportionality evaluation required by Re B (A Child) [2013] UKSC 33. On appellate review, those evaluative judgments were not wrong.

1. Court of Appeal (Civil Division): The appeals against the care and placement orders were dismissed by [2014] EWCA Civ 942.

2. Court of Appeal (permission): Permission to appeal was granted on the limited issue of whether the maternal grandparents could provide a permanent home: In the Matter of F (Children) and D-F (Children) [2014] EWCA Civ 439.

3. Ipswich County Court: HHJ Yelton made care and placement orders on 30 August 2013 after concluding that the maternal grandparents could not protect the children from emotional harm or provide the permanence they required.