Processes and determining factors when family court judgments are made in England about infants entering care at birth

ABSTRACT

This paper reports on the England part of a research project exploring judicial decision making in eight jurisdictions with respect to care applications in respect of new-born infants. Descriptive data are provided on a total cohort of 278 care applications made to three English family court care centres in 2016. Attention is paid to final orders made and findings are reported on differences between the three care centres with respect to the proportions of orders made (mainly placement orders; but also care orders and Special Guardianship Orders). A particular focus of the paper is on the ‘transparency’ of court processes as evidenced by the availability of transcripts of judgements. To add to the small proportion of cases (11%) where a transcript was available, 30 English judgements on new-borns reported to the BAILII data base in 2016 were also analysed. Differences were found between proportions of orders made when a judgement transcript was or was not available. It is argued that these results add to the call for greater transparency in the family courts.

KEYWORDS:

• Child protection
• new-born children
• family court
• judgements
• transparency
• court orders
• adoption

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for the time and insights of Professor Marit Skivenes and members and affiliates of the University of Bergen Centre for Research on Discretion and Paternalism. This research on English care centre cases would not have been possible without the agreement to access court records of the two Presidents of the Family Division, Sir James Munby and Sir Andrew McFarlane; of Anthony Douglas and Sarah Parsons and the members of the Cafcass team who identified the ‘care cases’ sample, of the DFJs and family teams in the three court centres and the family solicitor who provided advice and insights. I am extremely grateful for their encouragement, interest, time and patience in explaining their ways of working, and providing insights into the complexities of their roles within the family justice system. I also thank Dr Julie Doughty for very helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper and Lucy Reed, Chair of the Transparency Project and attenders at an April 2019 workshop for thought-provoking insights on different aspects of ‘transparency’.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Disclaimer

This publication from the project reflects only the author’s views and the funding agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information contained therein.

Notes

1. The higher rate in this study is explained by the different ways the new-born samples were defined. In our sample all children born after November 2015 and in 2016 who were subject to a Section 31 application during 2016 were included if they had never been in the sole care of a parent. Some originally entered care under Sec 20 provisions and care proceedings followed.

Additional information

Funding

This project has received funding from the Research Council of Norway under the Independent Projects – Humanities and Social Science programme (grant no. 262773).