England and Wales County Court (Family)

Neutral Citation Number: [2010] EWCC 13 (Fam)

In the County Court

Before:

HHJ X

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Between:

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Hearing dates: 25 January 2010

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WRITTEN REASONS

J U D G M E N T

1                 These proceedings of course concern ‘X’ and ‘Y’, X being the son of the Mother and D and Y being the son of the Mother and C.  X was born on 7^th November 2007 so he is now approaching two and a quarter, and Y on 15^th October 2008 so he is about 15 months old. The situation since these proceedings began in August 2008 is that X has been in foster care for most of that time, in other words since he was about nine months old, until he was moved to live with his parental grandparents on 12^th November of 2009.  Y, however, who was born after these proceedings were started, has been in foster care throughout.

2                 The applications that are now before the court are for Care Orders in respect of each of these two boys, each of whom of course has to be considered separately, and for a placement order in respect of Y.  The care plans in respect of each of them are quite different, the care plan for X being that he should remain with his parental grandparents but under the management of a Care Order, whereas for Y the plan is for him to be adopted.  Indeed, all possible alternative family placements for Y have been investigated right up until virtually the commencement of these proceedings but, as it now turns out, none is available.

3                 Those investigations were made because the evidence raised substantial issues as to whether Mother and C would be able to satisfy the court that it is in either child’s welfare interest to be parented by them as a couple, which is what they proposed, and I say “as a couple” because that is how they have presented for the past two years.  Both insist that it is their firm and settled intention to remain together as a couple for the future so there was no other way of approaching this. But that is perhaps the major factor that has given rise to views, which are adverse to Mother’s and C’s proposals, being expressed not only by the local authority and by the Guardian but also by the experts who have been instructed, who include Dr. R A, who was asked to report in respect of C’s potential substance misuse and, I should say, psychiatric background, also by Dr. S V B, a psychologist who was asked to report on a number of features of the relationship of both of the parents, and more recently by Mrs. L V A, an independent social worker who carried out a parenting assessment of both parents, and those reports have either been jointly obtained or have been obtained on behalf of the parents.            

4                 Their opinions follow on from, and to some extent I think were based upon, findings which I made in a Judgment which I gave on 10^th July of 2009 and this Judgment has to be read in conjunction with that earlier Judgment in order to make sense of some of the matters to which I shall make brief reference. That earlier Judgment of course also established that the threshold in section 31(2) of the Children Act 1989 was passed, thereby opening the way to this outcome or welfare hearing, and the position has been reached today where Mother and, to the extent that it affects him, C now accept the care plan in respect of X, as does X’s father D, which means that X will be brought up by his parental grandparents, subject, as I have mentioned, to a Care Order, assisted, no doubt, by their son and having somewhat infrequent contact to his mother which has now been agreed at seven times per annum as set out in the amended care plan. That contact, as I understand it, will be attended also by C, although he is not the father of X, but on the basis that he is the partner of X’s mother.

5                 As for Y, wholly understandably, neither Mother nor C can bring themselves to consent to Y’s adoption, and of course they had hoped that he would be able to move to live with and be brought up by his step-great aunt and her husband, but detailed investigations of their home circumstances have, in my judgment rightly, ruled them out and they have bowed to the inevitable but only last Friday. So, to adopt the vernacular, the rug has been well and truly pulled from under the parents’ feet at the very last moment.

6                 Taking the view that they could not realistically expect to overcome the wealth of evidence adverse to their wishes, the parents therefore decided not to actively oppose the making of either a Care Order or a Placement Order in Y’s case and I fully accept – and I hope this will be passed on to them – how difficult and painful this must have been for them but it is, if it is of any comfort to them, a realistic appraisal of their chances.  It means that the court must be persuaded that Y’s welfare requires that he be adopted because the position is not simply accepted.

7                 So today I have the Placement Order application before me issued, it has to be said, only minutes before I came into court, accompanied by a Statement of Facts.  I also have the Annex B report and the Guardian’s report, both of which, I think, were prepared in anticipation of the panel decision which in fact was made last Friday and ratified today and these documents set out the facts very fully and I can only say that I endorse their content; there is really nothing in it with which I would personally take issue.

8                 In my previous Judgment at paragraph 51 I attempted to summarise the risks that, as I saw it, C presented to a child growing up in his care. At the same time I sought to balance that at paragraph 53 by referring to positive features which, if developed, might help to redress the balance and I remarked that further assessment was necessary. That further assessment has been carried out and has come from the experts to which I have already made reference;  and I would just make one or two preliminary points about those assessments or about the parents’ response to them. Firstly, it is, sadly, disappointing to see that there have been failures by the parents (when I say “parents” I use that term slightly loosely in C’s sense) to commit to the contact arrangements that have been made but it is of particular concern, to my mind, that there has been such a haphazard approach by both of them to the need to present themselves for assessment, either on time or, in one or two cases, at all; and, secondly, complicating this issue are of course the conditions of C’s sex offender prevention order which, I think, is set out in section F of the bundle at page 536, which for a further eight years prevents him residing in any premises where a child under 18 resides. The Guardian’s view is that even if Mother were to have the care of either or both boys on her own, she would not be bothered if C were to breach those conditions which, on his track record, he is, I am bound to say, somewhat likely to do if it suits his wishes. The Guardian refers to this on page 12 of his 27 page report saying that “Evidence suggests that C has little regard for those in authority, the law and the truth and his lack of remorse or regret in respect of his social and moral conduct and his lack of self-discipline present him as an unreliable source of information, a person who has lied and manipulated others to best meet his needs”.  That, I think, puts in a nutshell why the Guardian feels that, if Y were to be in the mother’s care and separate from C, it simply would not work, and I am bound to agree with that.

9                 Basically, though, the assessments which I have referred to seem to agree these features, in respect of Mother, that she had a fractured childhood, some of which of course I have already referred to in my earlier Judgment, she had limited care by her own mother for that period of her life.  When she was aged 9 to about the age of 14 she was living with her mother and her siblings with C as her stepfather, and of course that is one of the features which has caused a great deal of concern in this case, given the relationship that was subsequently formed between them. Mrs. V A, with her customary insight, thinks that Mother has never really been attached to anyone except C in her life and that may go a long way to explain her loyalty to him at present. She was a girl whose schooling was limited, she left without qualifications, and of course by the time she was just 17 she was pregnant with X, who was born in fact before she had become 18; and the fact is – and I have already dealt with this in my previous Judgment – she is absolutely blind to any faults in C. She defends his past behaviour in such a way as to demonstrate that loyalty, and all this is dealt with very fully in Miss V B’s report, in particular, I think, at page 369, and the fact is Mother still puts C before her children. Miss V B refers to this and the Guardian summarises it on the same page of his report that I have already referred to where he says, “Mother has clearly prioritised her own need and desire to live with and be in a relationship with C, despite her clear knowledge and understanding that this action prevents her from having her children placed with her in her care”.  He goes on to refer to an interview he had with Mother on 7^th May 2009 when he asked her what she would do if she was faced with having to decide between care of her children or her relationship with C and, I quote, “She told me that she would choose C as she couldn’t help the way she felt for him, that she couldn’t help it that she loves him and wanted to be with him. This interview clearly identified to me that Mother had fully invested herself in her relationship with C and that her relationship with him took precedence above the relationship with her children”. Now, of course that is, on one view of the matter, commendable but it does demonstrate, sadly, why she has chosen to remain with C in her relationship to the point where she has had to come to accept that she cannot now have the care of her children.  It simply underlines the fact that the evidence shows that she is very much on her own apart from C and now has no family support to back her up; and her needs are paramount for her, such that she prioritises C in the way the Guardian has described and, in my view – and I am merely echoing what others, including the Guardian, have suggested – could not protect children in her care from C. In addition of course – I have already referred to this to some extent – she is somewhat ambivalent about working with professionals and would, in Miss V B’s view, be unlikely to engage in any treatment or therapy, some evidence of this being established by the fact that she turned down a mother and baby unit when that was offered to her. The sad thing is that behind all this there is evidence that she is able to provide adequately for her children’s day to day care.

10              As for C, his childhood has not been seen by him as disadvantaged, although in fact it may have been, but he too is someone whose schooling did not result in any qualifications for him and in fact he has had a somewhat poor employment history and has been unemployed now since 2006. He has a long history, already referred to in the previous Judgment, of substance misuse and to that I would add that he now has admitted during the course of assessment to having dealt in drugs as well. He has a skewed attitude to relationships emphasised in my previous Judgment. He has a criminal record which is quite significant in respect of violence and such things as drinking and driving and, again, during the course of assessment he admitted to a significant amount of unrecorded violence. He has, as I assess it, very poor self-awareness, and Miss V B, given the task of assessing this, came to the conclusion that he remains a moderate risk of sexual re-offending, although it is important to stress that this is not in relationship to small boys, including his own son, but in respect of teenage girls.  He too has been resistant to professional intervention, but he remains, according to Miss V B, a moderate risk of violence to the boys, and of course one has to look at this in the long term of C being Y’s carer over the duration of Y’s minority.  It is worrying that Mr. A has no relationship with his daughter, S, and has had none since she was three (and I believe she is now 17) and his whole approach to relationships has been, quite frankly, amoral.  He too, like Mother, is now very much centred upon his relationship with her, described by the psychologists as “the two of them united against the world”.  Miss V B took the view that it would be five years before anyone could be realistically persuaded that there was any real change in his attitude to crime or to violence and he would have had to have shown a clean record during that period, but that he was equally unlikely to engage in treatment or therapy, in particular because he did not feel that any was called for. I am concerned of course by the fact that he declined any further drug testing. I have already made reference to his poor commitment to the assessment process, which included assessment by Dr. A.  Mrs. V A summed up his life as being “chaotic and disorganised”.

11              Those features of the assessments which I have referred to are little more than a snapshot, frankly, because I am attempting in a few lines to distil hundreds of pages of evidence which of course is now unchallenged; but ultimately a court has to ask itself the fundamental question of what order best meets Y’s long term welfare needs, and the position, put starkly, is this. The parents no longer suggest they can, and I have to agree with that. Y would, I feel, be subjected to the risk of significant harm identified in the experts’ and the Guardian’s reports if he were to be cared for by his parents.  No other family placement is available to him, as already discussed, and Y of course is now 15 months old. As I have said, he has been with his foster carers throughout and is attached to them, as one might expect, and it is not unreasonable to expect that that attachment at his age can probably be transferred successfully to an adoptive placement. I am very conscious of the fact that he will lose his relationship to his half brother, X.  But, having said that, I can see no way of preserving that relationship unless prospective adopters can be found who are prepared to see some way of maintaining it without prejudicing their own position and perhaps their anonymity.  I am sure that Y’s welfare, that is to say his need now for a secure and final placement, outweighs the otherwise desirability of maintaining that sibling relationship.

12              So for those brief, somewhat shorthand reasons, in my judgment, there is really no sensible alternative to making a Care Order and a Placement Order in Y’s case to enable the care plan to be put into effect.  So I shall, therefore, make Care Orders and a Placement Order in Y’s case based on the amended care plans that have been placed before me and which I am sure will be typed up in a tidy form for future reference.

13              That said, I suspect there are no further directions that are required, other than the usual costs orders.