Source: https://suesspiciousminds.com/2013/11/23/the-leave-to-oppose-tsunami/
Timestamp: 2019-04-25 03:46:50+00:00

Document:
As anticipated, since Re B-S showed practitioners that the historically high (perhaps even insurmountable) test for leave to oppose adoption applications had been too high, and too heavily weighted in relation to the factor of potential disruption to the child in placement, the appeals have started to come in. I understand that Ryder LJ has already spoken of a “tsunami” of appeals which are heading towards the Court of Appeal.
The Placement Order had been made in Feb 2012 and the child placed with adopters in March 2012 (so we are getting on for a year and a half in placement). As the Court of Appeal observe, an unusual feature of the case is that the adopters had separated in the course of that placement – somewhat peculiarly they were jointly pursuing the adoption application though had not decided between themselves who the child was to live with. Early on in the court proceedings the prospective adoptive mother dropped out, leaving Mr X as the prospective adoptive father to carry on with the adoption application as a sole carer.
The Court of Appeal considered that the trial judge had not properly weighed the ultimate prospects of M succeeding in her application given the backdrop of uncertainty and change in the prospective adopters situation.
When a judge considers a parent’s prospects of success for the purposes of section 47(5), he is doing the best he can to forecast what decision the judge hearing the adoption application is going to make, having the child’s welfare throughout his life as his paramount consideration. What is ultimately going to be relevant to the decision whether to grant the adoption order or not must therefore also be material at the leave stage.
The judge deciding the adoption application would need to approach the hearing bearing in mind what McFarlane LJ said in Re G (supra) about the dangers of a linear approach to decision making in child care cases. He would have to make “a global, holistic evaluation of each of the options available for the child’s future upbringing” (Re G §50) before determining what would serve the child’s welfare throughout his life. In the present case, the strengths and the weaknesses of M’s situation would have to be considered in isolation, as would the strengths and weaknesses of Mr X’s situation, and, as McFarlane LJ said in §54 of Re G, each option would have to be “compared, side by side, against the competing option”. This exercise would have to be carried out remembering that adoption is only to be imposed where that is necessary, as the Supreme Court underlined in Re B  UKSC 33.
An option that might appear not to be in a child’s interests in one context might, by this process of global, holistic evaluation, carry the day in another context. Here, M’s case that she would be able to care for S, or alternatively that there should at least be a further assessment of her ability to do so, would not fall for consideration, as is usually the case, alongside a settled and stable adoptive placement which had been going on for some time. The competing option would involve an adoptive household which has been subjected to protracted disruption and uncertainty which is yet to be completely resolved. First, there was the separation of the adopters, then the change from a joint adoption to an adoption by Mr X on his own, with Mrs X withdrawing from S’s life completely. Mr X’s new relationship and the anticipated baby changed things again and there still remains the outstanding dispute over where Y will live. Even once that is resolved, it will no doubt take some time for the X family as a whole to learn to live with the consequences of these extensive changes. That there is uncertainty in both options, not just in M’s situation, may turn out to be a very important feature in determining what will serve S’s welfare throughout his life.
It seems to me that where the judge went wrong was in failing to consider whether the uncertainty in the adoptive household might improve M’s prospects of success and to make allowance for that. Putting it another way, what I think was missing was a consideration of M’s present position in the context of the disruption and uncertainty in the X household.
Although he went as far as contemplating that the adoptive placement with Mr X would not ultimately succeed, the judge dealt with that possibility by making the assumption that, in those circumstances, S would be moved by the local authority to carers whose parenting abilities were at least good enough and probably better than good enough (§56) and that, although there may be delay whilst they were identified, S would be cared for meanwhile “either by approved foster carers or by potential adopters known to have adequate parenting skills” (§59). Even if not entirely apposite to the legal situation arising here, one question that might at least have generated the right sort of consideration is whether, in the event that Mr X’s adoption application were not ultimately to succeed, as the judge contemplated was possible, it may in fact be appropriate to pursue further the possibility of a placement with M rather than S being placed forthwith by the local authority with an alternative adoptive family as the judge assumed would happen.
I do not think the judge can be criticised for being cautious about a return to M on the evidence as it stood. He said that it would be “experimental” and did not think it likely to succeed (§57). However, he appears to have been looking for quite a high degree of present certainty in this regard, speaking for instance of M being unable currently to “satisfy” the court of her abilities (§58). The degree to which a court needs to be confident about a parent’s abilities at the section 47(5) stage is likely to vary, in my view, depending on the other circumstances of the case and I say a little more about this in the final paragraph of this judgment. Where the other option under consideration also has significant uncertainties, a lesser degree of confidence may sometimes justify the granting of leave and it seems to me that that was so here. In such circumstances, it may also be that greater allowance might be appropriate for the fact that there has not been an opportunity for the evidence to be tested (both that in favour of M and that which may undermine her case).
Nothing that I have said in this judgment should be taken as any indication of a view of the ultimate strengths and weaknesses of Mr X’s application or (apart from the preliminary determination necessary for section 47) of M’s case. The evidence is not yet complete either in relation to Mr X’s circumstances or M’s, and none of it has yet been tested.
I would like to add a final few words of more general application than just this case. I am very conscious of the difficulties inherent in applications under section 47(5). The relationships and hopes of not just one family but two are imperilled and the material upon which the decision has to be taken is, of necessity, often far from complete and not infrequently has not been tested in a hearing with oral evidence. I have not intended in this judgment to be prescriptive as to the way in which such applications are handled by the expert family judges who resolve them with skill and sensitivity. Each case depends upon its own facts and the circumstances of individual cases vary infinitely. Where, for instance, a child has been placed with adopters for a protracted period, is well settled, and remembers nothing else, a court may well take the view that there has to be a degree of confidence about the parent’s ability to provide a suitable home for the child before it can even contemplate assessing the parent’s prospects as solid. And the cases show that the overall circumstances of the case may be such that the court may decide not to grant leave even where there is some confidence in the parent. Re B-S was an example of a mother who had achieved “an astonishing change of circumstances” (Re B-S, §3) but did not get leave to oppose adoption because of the situation of the children (ibid, §102). Re C (A Child)  EWCA Civ 431 was a case of a father who could have provided for the child’s physical needs but failed to get leave where the child (who was by then 4 ½ years old) had been settled with the adopters for over 2 years and had no relationship at all with him. At the other end of the spectrum, there will be cases in which the evident deficiencies in the parent’s case are such that, notwithstanding the existence of uncertainty or other issues in relation to the adoptive placement, the parent’s case is not solid enough to justify the grant of leave to oppose.
The appeal was effectively on the Re B-S, Re G and Re W grounds, that the Court had not properly weighed the mother’s prospects of success (which don’t have to be for return, they can be in persuading the Court to NOT make the adoption order), that the positive aspects of an alternative to adoption and the negative aspects of adoption had not been properly weighed.
Although Judge Caddick in the present case did not use the word “solidity” in connection with his assessment of M’s prospects of successfully opposing the adoption, that was clearly what he was looking for, finding it lacking as we can see from his statement that it would be “highly improbable” that the court would say the position was sufficiently different to enable M successfully to oppose the adoption application.
Was he wrong to assess M’s chances in this way and/or did he fail to demonstrate in his reasoning how he arrived at this conclusion, as Ms Connolly said?
In answering this question, it is important to read the judgment as a whole. As the court observed in Re B-S (see §74(ii)), the question of whether there has been a change in circumstances and whether the parent has solid grounds for seeking leave are almost invariably intertwined and so they were here. The position that the judge reached, as he said expressly in §18, was that there had been a change in circumstances but that there were also features of the period following the making of the placement order which weighed against the progress that M had made, three in particular being identified in §§18 to 26 of the judgment. The judge’s concern about these was that the offence in June 2012 and the incident in February 2013 in particular indicated remaining immaturity on the part of M; in my judgment he was entitled to take that view, even allowing for the difficult circumstances in June 2012. HHe He rightly put these events into the context of M’s previous immaturity and, although he could perhaps have reasoned this stage in his decision making more fully, we can see, I think, from §38 that, quite independently of the question of how L would be affected by delay and/or the disruption of her placement, he concluded that the overall picture was such that M was unlikely to be able to establish that her position was different enough to persuade a court that it was in L’s interests to be placed with her. He had the particular advantage of having heard M’s oral evidence in which the events since the placement order were explored and it seems to me that he was entitled to arrive at this assessment, which deprived the M’s prospects of the necessary solidity.
It was entirely appropriate that the judge should consider L’s circumstances and those of the adopters. Re B-S underlines that what is paramount in adoption decisions is the welfare of the child throughout his or her life and that it is important for judges not to attach undue weight to the short term consequences to the child of giving leave. It does not, however, say that even short term consequences for the child are completely irrelevant and they certainly are not. Similarly, Re B-S recognises that in some cases the adverse impact on the prospective adopters, and thus on the child, is something which may have considerable force (§74(ix)) although equally it is important that undue weight should not be given to the argument for the reasons set out in that paragraph.
I do not accept the argument that the judge omitted to consider, or to give proper weight to, the benefits to L of being brought up by her own mother. That vitally important factor is recognised in §37 of the judgment, albeit in quite short form and without express reference to the provisions of section 1 of the Act. It was also stressed in the passage which, in directing himself on the law, the judge cited from Re P, which concludes with a statement that the paramount consideration of the court must be the child’s welfare throughout his or her life. As I see it, the core of the judge’s decision was that he just did not consider that the changes in M (for which he properly recognised she should be commended) were going to be sufficient to enable a court to conclude that she could bring up L at the present time.
I have not been persuaded by the arguments so cogently advanced on M’s behalf that the judge erred in his approach to this case or failed to set out his reasoning for his decision sufficiently. I would accordingly dismiss the appeal.
I am beginning to wonder whether the publication, in anonymised form, of the original judgment ought to be considered with such appeals. Where the appeal turns on the quality and wording of the judgment, and Judges up and down the country need to know what “passes” and what “fails” it might be helpful to see them in full.
Posted in adoption, case law and tagged adoption appeals, appeals, Court of Appeal, leave to oppose adoption, re d 2013, re l 2013. Bookmark the permalink.
Many cases will never get to the court of appeal because an appeal from the FPC is to the County Court and if permission is not given then domestic proceedings are exhausted.
Many cases will not get to appeal because the parents cannot afford the fight.
Not every person is clued enough to LIP. Shame on this country.
The whole case only serves to demonstarte as to why the LA should be working with keeping families together rather than automatically snatching the child away for adoption purposes.
Publication of all judgments was proposed in the consultation initiated by the President earlier this year. I took this to include FPC judgments, whether they have gone to appeal or not.
Hi Julie – yes, that helps. What I would want is to see the transcript from the original case alongside the appeal – if appeals are going to turn on the craft of the original judgment, it becomes very important to see what the CoA deem okay and what they don’t. Not sure an anonymised transcript will necessarily be easy to link to an appeal case months later without fishing around for it. I hope it is done automatically. I also think thresholds should be published with appeals as a matter of course. Re B in particular is muddy and opaque due to not being able to see the threshold document that is being debated.

References: §50
 §54
 UKSC 
 §3
 §102
 EWCA 
 §74
 §18
 §38
 §37