S (A Child)

In care and adoption proceedings, appellate review focuses on the substance of the welfare evaluation rather than the sequence or structure of the judgment. The court must assess each realistic option, including care by a parent and adoption, by weighing its advantages and disadvantages and comparing it with the alternatives.

Adoption is justified only where the child’s welfare requires it because no less drastic option can meet the child’s needs. A local authority’s defective evaluation does not alone invalidate the decision if the judge independently undertook a sound evaluation on the evidence.

The mother appealed against orders made by HHJ Davies in the Luton County Court and Family Court on 2 December 2016. The orders placed the child under a care order and authorised placement for adoption, with parental consent dispensed with.

The appeal challenged the evaluation of alternative arrangements, including Shared Lives accommodation, the assessment of risk and the judge’s alleged linear approach. The central issue was whether the judge had properly conducted the required holistic and proportionate welfare evaluation.

1. Appeal dismissed. The judge’s conclusion that the mother could not provide safe and sufficiently consistent care without intensive full-time support was supported by the expert evidence and the detailed evidence of the foster carer. The Court of Appeal would not interfere unless the conclusion was wrong and unsupported by the evidence.

2. The required approach, reflected in Re B-S [2013] EWCA Civ 1146, was to ask whether the disadvantages of each non-adoption option were so great that only adoption could meet the child’s welfare needs. Each option had to be examined sufficiently to weigh its internal advantages and disadvantages and then compared with the competing options.

3. The fact that a judgment considers options sequentially does not make the analysis legally defective. Re R [2014] EWCA Civ 1625 established that the focus is on the substance of the judicial analysis, not its structure or form. The Court also approved the balancing formulation in Re G (Care Proceedings: Welfare Evaluation) [2013] EWCA Civ 965, [2014] 1 FLR 670.

4. The word realistic ordinarily concerns the early pruning of obviously unrealistic options before the final hearing. It did not mean that placement with the mother had been excluded at the outset. That option had been investigated over a nine-day hearing and was rejected only after the judge evaluated the evidence.

5. A Shared Lives arrangement could not avoid the need to establish that the mother could safely parent the child, because the mother would remain the child’s primary carer. Support from other adults and services did not remove that requirement.

6. Even if the local authority had failed to conduct a fully compliant pre-hearing evaluation under Re B-S, the appeal would succeed only if that failure infected and compromised the judge’s own evaluation. The judge had independently considered the totality of the evidence, applied the welfare checklist under the Adoption and Children Act 2002, and concluded that adoption was required.

The appeal was therefore dismissed.

1. Court of Appeal (Civil Division) dismissed the mother’s appeal against the care and adoption orders: [2017] EWCA Civ 249.
2. Luton County Court and Family Court, HHJ Davies, made the care order and order authorising placement for adoption on 2 December 2016.