England and Wales Court of Appeal (Civil Division) Decisions

IN THE COURT OF APPEAL (CIVIL DIVISION)
ON APPEAL FROM READING COUNTY COURT
(HER HONOUR JUDGE HAMILTON)

		Royal Courts of Justice Strand, London, WC2A 2LL
		16th January 2013

Lord Justice McFarlane:

1. This is an application made at an oral hearing by Ms W, who is the mother of a boy, J, who was born on 2 March 1995. J has been the subject of a full care order since a determination by HHJ Hamilton in the Reading County Court on 10 February 2012, nearly a year ago. Prior to that on 28 November 2011 HHJ Hamilton made an interim care order authorising the removal of J from his mother's home. Following that order J was indeed removed from his mother's home and since then he has been cared for at the home of his father and/or at a residential school. Interim orders for contact have been made by the court, but in the final order of 10 February the local authority were given permission to refuse contact between mother and J for the remainder of his minority. J's mother has issued no less than 11 notices of appeal seeking to challenge effectively every single order that was made during the course of these care proceedings. The orders under challenge by the various notices run from 28 June 2011, when there was a directions hearing before HHJ Hamilton, through to the final order made on 10 February 2012. Having read the paperwork, it is plain that the two key orders and the two key determinations are those of 28 November 2011 and the final order of 10 February 2012.
2. Notices of Appeal have been issued at three stages. The first four were issued on 29 May 2012, some five months or so after most of the matters complained about in them. A further notice was issued on 28 June in relation to an order made on 23 January 2012, and the remaining six Notices of Appeal were issued on 24 August 2012 complaining about orders in the latter part of 2011 or January 2012. The Notices of Appeal are in effectively identical terms, and Mrs W has photocopied the front sheet of each one, highlighting however in the text which of the individual orders made in the sequence she seeks to challenge. The basic documentation generated by these notices is supported by a number of global documents. The main one is a set of grounds of appeal. It runs to 35 pages and contains 214 paragraphs in small type. Having read through that document, both in December of last year for the purposes of giving directions and then again before this hearing today, I regard it as containing a rambling stream of consciousness in which it is very difficult for the reader to see the wood for the trees. It is almost impossible to identify the primary grounds of appeal relied upon. The reader is assisted by a second document, again headed "Grounds of Appeal" and dated 26 June 2012. That runs to some ten pages and seeks to go through each of the orders complained of in terms. It is not possible in this short judgment to itemise each and every matter complained of, but many of the complaints relate to the administration of the court process rather than the substance of the order. They relate to the name of the child as it is displayed on the order, or, on occasions whether the order has been clearly printed or not; there is a complaint that the judge on occasions has not signed the order; there are also complaints that orders were made against the mother's will, although she had parental responsibility.
3. There are more substantial complaints as to the process as a whole, relating to whether or not J's wishes and feelings were taken into account, whether or not the assessments that were undertaken were undertaken legally or not, and there are complaints that the judge was biased and was following a predetermined course. The range of points made and the way in which they are described is widely put. I have read all of that material. Very much of it has no legal basis to substantiate it as a ground of appeal, and the striking point about the material put in by Mrs W, which as I have indicated is very dense and fulsome, is that it does not at any point engage with the substance of the issue that was before the court. In very short terms, the substance of the issue was that the care being given to J by his mother in his mother's home was causing him significant harm. He was, the judge found, kept in a regime in his mother's care which largely confined him to her home, only going out in her company; that his regime during the 24-hour day there was not conducive to his well-being; that he had no friends, but was isolated; he was not in receipt of a proper education; and in short, he was not being allowed to develop in a way that would fit him for adult life.
4. The judge in the course of his main judgment indicates that on the professional and expert advice he had received there was but one last chance for J to be given the opportunity to develop into an independent freestanding adult individual and that was to be removed from his mother's care to a supportive and directive environment such as the residential school that I have mentioned. The judge, therefore, found the section 31 threshold criteria established at the November 2011 hearing and gave the detail for that conclusion in a reserved judgment delivered on 16 December 2011. He went on to make the interim care order sanctioning J's removal prior to conducting a final hearing on 10 February 2012, which again was supported by a full judgment cataloguing not only what had gone on before the decision to remove, but more particularly what had happened thereafter and why he had taken the course of restricting the mother's contact to J. Virtually none of those matters, which were the engine room of the judge's concern about J, are touched upon by Mrs W in the course of the sea of paperwork that she has submitted to this court.
5. Be that as it may, the purpose of this hearing is to consider now on 16 January 2013 whether Mrs W should have permission to appeal any of the orders that she seeks to challenge. This decision is being taken by me in the chronological context of a year effectively having passed since the substantive orders were made by the judge; well over a year has passed since the case management orders were made which are also the subject of potential challenge; but most importantly, J is to be 18 on 2 March 2013, which is now only some five or six weeks away. If I give permission to appeal, it is highly unlikely that any appeal could be heard before J is 18. On his 18^th birthday the entirety of the orders made by the judge under the Children Act will come to an end. It therefore seems to me that there is absolutely no merit in granting permission to appeal simply in that chronological context.
6. But going further, having now immersed myself in the detail that the mother seeks to put before the court, I take the view that her case is totally lacking in merit.
7. An example, simply to record a matter that is freshly before the court, is that she, in the limited time available to her this morning, has sought to refer to a section 47 report prepared in September 2008, some three years before the judge's decisions. The point that she seeks to make is that the printed copy of the report records that the social worker saw the child, J, on "25/09/2008". Immediately below that date, the following text appears:

"'Date child seen' entered above is inaccurate as child was never seen as part of this inquiry as Mrs W has refused consent for this to happen. However, due to the way that PARIS is set up, it is not possible to authorise a section 47 inquiry without 'date child seen'. Fictitious date therefore entered to progress with the administrative power to the child protection process, e.g. completing the conference report." [PARIS is the acronym for the social service IT system].

Mrs W submits to me that this is a very important point. It shows that the social workers lied in preparing the report. They fabricated a date upon which they claim to have seen the child, but in reality they did not see the child at all and that therefore renders the entire section 47 process unlawful and takes away the credibility of any information that the social workers gave to the court at any time after that date of September 2008.

8. That is an astonishing submission. It cannot possibly be sustained on any basis, and in particular looking at the document itself nobody would be hoodwinked or tricked or in any way misled as to what was going on because the writer of the report had entered the clear caveat that I have already quoted. That is but one example of the sort of points that Mrs W seeks to make before the court and it is in contrast to the fact that she does not begin to engage with the core issue as to the judge's conclusions, namely her care of J and the evidence that was before the judge, unanimous professional evidence, that supported his conclusions. Her response to that is simply to deny that there was any value in it. For her to bombard the Court of Appeal with the material that she has and to seek to appeal every single order in the case is in my view an abuse of process. It has led to this court having to spend a period measured in four or five hours wading through the material in an application which is now absolutely arid in terms of its staleness and the proximity that it has to the child's 18^th birthday.
9. Even if this appeal had been considered in a timely manner 12 months ago, I regard it to be totally unarguable and I have no hesitation in refusing each and every one of these applications for permission to appeal.

Order: Applications refused