H (A Child)
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | Lord Justice McFarlane |
| Judgment Date | 18 January 2012 |
| Neutral Citation | [2012] EWCA Civ 106 |
| Date | 18 January 2012 |
| Court | Court of Appeal (Civil Division) |
| Docket Number | Case No: B4/2011/2539 |
[2012] EWCA Civ 106
IN THE COURT OF APPEAL (CIVIL DIVISION)
ON APPEAL FROM GUILDFORD COUNTY COURT
(HER HONOUR JUDGE RAESIDE)
Royal Courts of Justice
Strand, London, WC2A 2LL
Lord Justice Mcfarlane
Case No: B4/2011/2539
The Appellant father appeared in person, assisted by his brother.
The Respondents did not appear and were not represented.
( As Approved)
This is an application for permission to appeal against a decision made by HHJ Raeside on 9 September 2011 in Guildford County Court. The proceedings before the judge on that day concerned the welfare of a young boy W who was born on 1 February 2004 and is therefore very shortly going to be eight years old. There has been dispute between W's parents going back over a number of years as to the arrangements for his care, and in particular the level of involvement that his father should have with him, given that W, following the parents' separation, lives with his mother.
On 25 February 2008 HHJ Rylance made a shared residence order which apportioned approximately half of the school holiday times between each parent and set up an arrangement whereby every other weekend W went to stay with his father during the school term time from Friday after school until the beginning of the school day on the following Monday morning.
The dispute between the parents, however, continued as to various matters, in particular early in 2011 W's religious upbringing. The matter came before HHJ Rylance on 22 March 2011; part of the issues raised there included an application by the father for an additional period of contact to bridge the gap between the alternate weekends. The matter was set down for hearing initially in June but that date was soon vacated because the NYAS worker, Mr Vobe, who had been appointed in September 2010 to act for W, was not available for the June date. Therefore all outstanding issues were listed to be heard on 9 September before a circuit judge and that judge turned out not to be HHJ Rylance, who had had conduct of many of the hearings in the case before, but HHJ Raeside. The time estimate given for the hearing by the court was 30 minutes; that can be seen by the notice of hearing at page A32. Nevertheless, although the issue of religious upbringing had been agreed between the parents sometime prior to 9 September, there was a real issue as to the arrangements for contact. By that time Mr Vobe had seen W on three occasions and had reported that on each of those occasions that W had, in various ways, indicated a preference for the weekend contact to start on a Saturday morning rather than a Friday evening. It was also the mother's case that she did not enjoy the fact that every other weekend she did not see her child from Friday morning when he went off to school until Monday afternoon when she collected him. The father, apart from looking to achieve additional contact as I have described, certainly wished to hold on to the Friday evenings.
The judge determined the matter having heard brief submissions but having read papers in the case, including detailed written submissions put in on behalf of the father. The judge gave a short judgment in which she relied entirely upon what W had been...
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