Re G (A Child) (Interim Care Order)
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | Lord Justice Wall,Lord Justice Ward |
| Judgment Date | 07 February 2008 |
| Neutral Citation | [2008] EWCA Civ 86 |
| Court | Court of Appeal (Civil Division) |
| Date | 07 February 2008 |
| Docket Number | Case No: B4/2008/0259 |
[2008] EWCA Civ 86
IN THE SUPREME COURT OF JUDICATURE
COURT OF APPEAL (CIVIL DIVISION)
ON APPEAL FROM NOTTINGHAM COUNTY COURT
(HIS HONOUR JUDGE INGLIS)
Royal Courts of Justice
Strand, London, WC2A 2LL
Lord Justice Ward and
Lord Justice Wall
Case No: B4/2008/0259
Mr I Wise and Ms C Gallagher (instructed by Bhatia Best Solicitors) appeared on behalf of the Appellant Mother.
Mrs R Rowley (instructed by Nottingham City Council) appeared on behalf of the Respondent Authority.
Mrs B Gilead appeared on behalf of the Respondent Father.
Miss Mulrennan appeared on behalf of the Respondent Guardian.
The mother of a new born child, a boy who will be identified by the initial K, seeks permission to appeal against an interim care order made by HHJ Inglis, sitting in the Nottingham County Court on 1 February 2008.
K's mother, whom I will call G, was born on 31 May 1989, so she is 18. She has, on any view, had a very difficult and disrupted life. K himself was born in hospital in Nottingham in the early hours of 30 January 2008. Very shortly afterwards, the local authority, acting pursuant to the minutes of an inter-agency pre-birth child protection case conference and a subsequent “birth plan prepared for the hospital staff by the [local NHS primary care trust]” removed K from his mother's care and placed him in a separate ward in the hospital.
G is, of course, now an adult. However, she had previously been in the care of the local authority, and it is not disputed by the local authority that G was entitled to look to it for continuing support under the leaving care legislation. Her case is that what is known as the “pathway plan” prepared by the local authority is sufficiently deficient as to be unlawful and she has therefore issued proceedings for judicial review of the plan in the Administrative Court.
As it so happened, the judicial review proceedings, which had, of course, to be issued in the High Court came before Munby J, sitting in London on 30 January. The judge was told of the local authority's removal of K from his mother's care. It was plain, and was not disputed by the local authority, that it had not obtained any prior court order permitting it to remove K, and that the removal was, as a consequence, unlawful. Munby J accordingly made a peremptory order requiring the local authority forthwith to reunite mother and child, and that order was immediately put into effect.
The local authority did then what, of course, it should have done in the first place, which was to issue care proceedings. It did so on 30 January 2008. Care proceedings have, of course, to be issued in the Family Proceedings Court, but can be swiftly transferred upwards. That is what happened in this case, and the local authority's application for an interim care order was heard in the county court by HHJ Inglis on 31 January 2008, and 1 February 2008, when he gave judgment. We have before us an excellent note of that judgment.
Speaking for myself, and without going into details, I am entirely satisfied that the judge was entitled to make an interim care order on the material available to him. I do not wish to embarrass G or to burden this judgment with any unnecessary citation of fact; but, as I say, in my view, the order which the judge made was one plainly within the exercise of a proper judicial discretion under section 38(1) and (2) of the Children Act 1989. Indeed it is conceded by Mr Wise this afternoon that the threshold criteria under section 38(2) of the Act are met and, in my judgment, as I say, the exercise of the judge's discretion in making a care order was in the circumstances almost inevitable.
That of course leaves a large number of questions unanswered. The child at the moment is in foster care and the mother, we are told, has contact with him on five days a week for three hours at a time. The critical question which in due course a judge of the Family Division or a circuit judge will have to decide is what should happen to this little baby; what should happen to K?
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R (on the application of G) v Nottingham City Council
...WLR 1098, HL. F v Wirral Metropolitan BC [1991] 2 All ER 648, [1991] Fam 69, [1991] 2 WLR 1132, CA. G (a child) (interim care order), Re[2008] EWCA Civ 86, [2008] All ER (D) 107 (Feb). G (a child) (interim care order: residential assessment), Re[2005] UKHL 68, [2005] 3 FCR 621, [2006] 1 All......
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R (G) v Nottingham City Council - and - Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust
...Care Order: Residential Assessment) [2005] UKHL 68, [2006] 1 AC 576. 7 For reasons explained by Wall LJ in his judgment (see Re G [2008] EWCA Civ 86) the Court of Appeal transferred the care proceedings from the Nottingham County Court to the High Court and directed that the matter was to b......