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Posted on November 19, 2014 by suesspiciousminds
The third Court of Appeal decision in a month to backtrack from “nothing else will do” and this one does so very powerfully. (previous two Re MH and Re M, both blogged about last month)
To the point of saying that it is not a test.
In case you are pushed for time to read this, I’m afraid that you still have to write/read all the analysis of the various options, and the Court still have to consider those options and analyse them, but the Court of Appeal say that “nothing else will do” isn’t a test, but a process of deductive reasoning.
In case you are new to the whole adoption debate, then welcome, and in a nutshell there appears in the last year to have been a tension between the Government (pushing a pro adoption agenda, including telling social workers to stop thinking of adoption as a last resort) and the senior judiciary, who have been mindful of the principle that adoption is a last resort.
Even the President of the Family Division has acknowledged this tension
http://www.localgovernmentlawyer.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=18284:top-judge-recognises-tension-over-court-rulings-and-guidance-on-adoption&catid=54:childrens-services-articles
the Department for Education said: “The local authorities that are most successful in finding adoptive families for looked after children will generally be those with a very clear care planning process that always considers adoption as a possible permanence option and not an option of last resort.”
Asked about the issue by Local Government Lawyer at a press conference yesterday (29 April), Sir James responded: “Under our system Parliament makes the law in passing a statute. Parliament, I emphasise; not the Government. It’s Parliament that legislates. It is for the judges to decide what the statute means.
“The Supreme Court has ruled what it believes the statute means and under our system that is the definitive judicial view but of course under our system the relevant statutes can be changed as Parliament wishes to do so.”
But the President added: “I’d be foolish not to acknowledge as I do that there is a clear tension between what the Supreme Court said in Re B in the summer of last year and what the Government had said in guidance which it issued only a few months before in the spring of last year…..
“So there is a tension there but under our system Parliament makes the law; the judges interpret the law and if Parliament does not agree with the judges’ interpretation of the statute they passed, then the remedy is for Parliament to change the law.”
The Family President added: “In saying that I think I’ve acknowledged that there is that tension there. But I appreciate that on the ground, as it were, for the directors of social services; for the social workers dealing with adoption cases; it must be slightly difficult to know exactly what they should be doing given that tension.”
You might want to put a mental Post-it Note on the President (the lead author of Re B-S) saying THIS
The Supreme Court has ruled what it believes the statute means and under our system that is the definitive judicial view
Because the Court of Appeal (Ryder LJ lead judgment) are currently saying THIS
Turning then to the issue in this appeal. I do not accept that Re B and Re B-S re-draw the statutory landscape. The statutory test has not changed. I have set it out at [26] above. It is unhelpful to add any gloss to that statutory test as the gloss tends to cause the test to be substituted by other words or concepts.
Have fun reconciling those two things.
The case is CM v Blackburn with Darwin Council 2014 (lead judgment Ryder LJ)
http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2014/1479.html
The point of the appeal was an issue that immediately came into most people’s minds following Re B-S – dual planning.
It is not (or was not) unusual, to see a care plan that said “we will search for an adoptive placement for the child for 6 months, and if that is not successful, then a foster placement will be found”
As a matter of law, based on the principle of “nothing else will do”, how could a Court say that fostering would not do in order to make the Placement Order, when the plan envisages fostering being a possible outcome? Either it is permissible to say “adoption is better than fostering for this child, but both would do” or on a strict interpretation of “nothing else will do” the Court should reject the Placement Order as there is clearly something else that will do (fostering, explicitly provided for in the dual care plan as the fallback)
The Local Authority in such cases aren’t saying that fostering won’t meet the needs of the child, it is saying that adoption is a BETTER way of meeting those needs. (which for me is fine and common sense – they have to make the case, but a Court should have that discretion)
Is that compatible with “nothing else will do” ?
Well, given cases in October (and cough, the adoption figures and political uproar), it is not surprising that the Court of Appeal say “yes, dual planning is compatible with the law”
Here’s what they have to say about “nothing else will do” (and it is not only a major shift, but it probably makes large parts of the Myth-Busting document now accurate, or at least more accurate than it was before this judgment was published – so it was a fortune-telling document as well as a Myth-Busting one)
Turning then to the issue in this appeal. I do not accept that Re B and Re B-S re-draw the statutory landscape. The statutory test has not changed. I have set it out at [26] above. It is unhelpful to add any gloss to that statutory test as the gloss tends to cause the test to be substituted by other words or concepts. The test remains untouched but the court’s approach to the evidence needed to satisfy the test and the approach of practitioners to the existing test without doubt needed revision. That can be seen in graphic form in the comments of the President in Re B-S at [30]
“we have real concerns about the recurrent inadequacy of the analysis of reasoning put forward in support of the case for adoption, both in the materials put before the court by local authorities and guardians and also in too many judgments. This is nothing new, but it is time to call a halt.”
Yes, you have read that right – the Court of Appeal are now calling nothing else will do an unnecessary gloss on the statutory test. A gloss that a year ago they were embracing and thrusting on us all. We are rewriting history here – in the words of Kevin Costner “We’re through the looking glass here, people”.
Someone else might hear make a cruel remark about irony and unfortunate glosses to statute, but that would be beneath me.
The Court of Appeal goes on
Neither the decision of the Supreme Court nor that of this court in Re B-S has created a new test or a new presumption. What the decisions do is to explain the existing law, the decision making process that the court must adopt to give effect to Strasbourg jurisprudence and domestic legislation and the evidential requirements of the same.
(That will delight the Government and Mr Narey – as this is their line. But go on, please)
A court making a placement order decision must conduct a five part exercise. It must undertake a welfare analysis of each of the realistic options for the child having regard among any other relevant issues to the matters set out in section 1(4) of the 2002 Act (the ‘welfare checklist’). That involves looking at a balance sheet of benefits and detriments in relation to each option. It must then compare the analysis of each option against the others. It must decide whether an option and if so which option safeguards the child’s welfare throughout her life: that is the court’s welfare evaluation or value judgment that is mandated by section 1(2) of the Act. It will usually be a choice between one or more long term placement options. That decision then feeds into the statutory test in sections 21(3)(b) and 52 of the 2002 Act, namely whether in the context of what is in the best interests of the child throughout his life the consent of the parent or guardian should be dispensed with. The statutory test as set out above has to be based in the court’s welfare analysis which leads to its value judgment. In considering whether the welfare of the child requires consent to be dispensed with, the court must look at its welfare evaluation and ask itself the question whether that is a proportionate interference in the family life of the child. That is the proportionality evaluation that is an inherent component of the domestic statutory test and a requirement of Strasbourg jurisprudence.
[You may be seeing here that there is no mention of the least interventionist order, last resort, draconian nature of the order – that’s all bound up here in proportionality. But it is fairly pivotal and important that it was the specific issue of whether adoption was a proportionate answer and the circumstances in which it might be that led to the ECHR decision in Y v UK which was at the heart of Re B and Re B-S. It is a strange omission, and one which is also conspicuous by its absence in the Myth-Busting document]
That is what ‘nothing else will do’ means. It involves a process of deductive reasoning. It does not require there to be no other realistic option on the table, even less so no other option or that there is only one possible course for the child. It is not a standard of proof. It is a description of the conclusion of a process of deductive reasoning within which there has been a careful consideration of each of the realistic options that are available on the facts so that there is no other comparable option that will meet the best interests of the child.
“nothing else will do” is not a test – that noise you may hear as you read this is your eyes rolling. It is just a description of the process of deductive reasoning. Therefore, if the Judge has carried out the balancing exercise and answers the question “Am I satisfied that nothing else but adoption will do?” with a “No”, can he or she make the Placement Order? If it is not a test, but just a description of a process, then possibly.
I mean, this is just flat out strange – the Supreme Court made themselves rather plain, I thought. But now we are told that this is not in fact a test, and we should just read the word as ‘requires’
I’ll deviate for a moment
Supreme Court, Re B June 2013. http://www.familylawweek.co.uk/site.aspx?i=ed114409
We are all familiar with Lady Hale’s key paragraphs, but I’ll set them out, because they seem to be vanishing before our eyes. Note that on the issue of “nothing else will do” she says that all of the Supreme Court Judges agree on that. And she is right. Although she gave a minority judgment in the case overall (i.e whether the Judge had got the individual case right or wrong), on this aspect, these paragraphs reflect the decision of the Supreme Court.
Perhaps above all, however, this case raises the issue of when it is proper for an appellate court to interfere in the decisions of the trial judge who has heard and read all the evidence and reached his conclusions after careful cogitation following many days of hearing in court and face-to-face contact with the people involved. We all agree that an appellate court can interfere if satisfied that the judge was wrong. We also all agree that a court can only separate a child from her parents if satisfied that it is necessary to do so, that “nothing else will do”.
Nevertheless, it is quite clear that the test for severing the relationship between parent and child is very strict: only in exceptional circumstances and where motivated by overriding requirements pertaining to the child’s welfare, in short, where nothing else will do.
But that is not the end of the story. We all agree that an order compulsorily severing the ties between a child and her parents can only be made if “justified by an overriding requirement pertaining to the child’s best interests”. In other words, the test is one of necessity. Nothing else will do.
Let’s now look at the words of the President in Re B-S on this issue
Section 52(1)(b) of the 2002 Act provides, as we have seen, that the consent of a parent with capacity can be dispensed with only if the welfare of the child “requires” this. “Require” here has the Strasbourg meaning of necessary, “the connotation of the imperative, what is demanded rather than what is merely optional or reasonable or desirable”: Re P (Placement Orders: Parental Consent) [2008] EWCA Civ 535, [2008] 2 FLR 625, paras 120, 125. This is a stringent and demanding test.
Just how stringent and demanding has been spelt out very recently by the Supreme Court in In re B (A Child) (Care Proceedings: Threshold Criteria) [2013] UKSC 33, [2013] 1 WLR 1911. The significance of Re B was rightly emphasised in two judgments of this court handed down on 30 July 2013: Re P (A Child) [2013] EWCA Civ 963, para 102 (Black LJ), and Re G (A Child) [2013] EWCA Civ 965, paras 29-31 (McFarlane LJ). As Black LJ put it in Re P, Re B is a forceful reminder of just what is required.
The language used in Re B is striking. Different words and phrases are used, but the message is clear. Orders contemplating non-consensual adoption – care orders with a plan for adoption, placement orders and adoption orders – are “a very extreme thing, a last resort”, only to be made where “nothing else will do”, where “no other course [is] possible in [the child’s] interests”, they are “the most extreme option”, a “last resort – when all else fails”, to be made “only in exceptional circumstances and where motivated by overriding requirements pertaining to the child’s welfare, in short, where nothing else will do”: see Re B paras 74, 76, 77, 82, 104, 130, 135, 145, 198, 215.
It is time to draw the threads together and to spell out what good practice, the 2002 Act and the Convention all demand.
All of these “striking” words, we are now told, were not intended to amount to any change in the legal test or a gloss on the statute. Anybody interpreting the word ‘require’ in the wording of the statute as now incorporating those principles is just wrong, or that a Judge is expected to answer a question about whether “nothing else will do but adoption” is wrong.
52 (1)The court cannot dispense with the consent of any parent or guardian of a child to the child being placed for adoption or to the making of an adoption order in respect of the child unless the court is satisfied that— .
(a)the parent or guardian cannot be found or is incapable of giving consent, or .
(b)the welfare of the child requires the consent to be dispensed with.
Re B-S is thus, presumably, case management guidance rather than law. One wonders, if that’s the case, why it wasn’t all set out in a Practice Direction rather than a judgment, given that the primary author of Re B-S had the power to do that. [I don’t believe for a second that Re B-S wasn’t intended as an authority that Judges who failed to properly engage with proportionality and necessity and the Re B principles would be at risk of appeal]
I will give a caveat to all of this – I’m sure that there were very good Judges up and down the country who were grappling with these issues in their judgments before Re B, and were properly considering the pros and cons of adoption and were not doing as criticised in Re G by a linear process of “if I’ve ruled out mum, dad and grandparents, what is left is adoption, so adoption IS the last resort”. For those very good Judges, Re B and Re B-S didn’t really change the way they were doing those judgments and making their decisions. But it was very plain from the volume of successful appeals that there were Judges who weren’t.
(And I don’t think that those were bad judges or flawed judges – it was rather that it had become general practice to use that linear model and it was only once McFarlane LJ highlighted the inherent flaws in it in Re G that some shifted. From the published judgments that I have read on Bailii in the last year, a surprising number of placement order judgments still fail to do that and simply replace analysis by quoting large chunks of the caselaw and saying “I have considered this” thus failing to see the point that the Court of Appeal appear to have been making in their condemnation of stock phrases and judicial window-dressing)
Were Re B and Re B-S new law, a fresh interpretation of the word ‘requires’ in the statute, or a gloss? Or were they as is being suggested now, a reinforcement and reminder of the existing law containing nothing fresh other than case-management guidance? We could dance on the head of a pin forever on that one.
If it was nothing fresh, it is surprising that so many successful appeals were happening last autumn and winter …
Back to the Court of Appeal in this particular case.
The words of Lord Nicholls in In re B (A Minor) (Adoption: Natural Parent) [2001] UKHL 70, [20012] 1 WLR 258 cited with approval in the Supreme Court in Re B remain apposite:
“[16] … There is no objectively certain answer on which two or more possible courses is in the best interests of a child. In all save the most straightforward cases, there are competing factors, some pointing one way and some another. There is no means of demonstrating that one answer is clearly right and another clearly wrong. There are too many uncertainties involved in what, after all, is an attempt to peer into the future and assess the advantages and disadvantages which this or that course will or may have for the child.”
This court has on two recent occasions highlighted the way in which the proportionality evaluation is being misconstrued by practitioners. In each case practitioners were reminded to use the concept that was described by the Supreme Court in Re B. In M-H (A Child) [2014] EWCA Civ 1396 Macur LJ at [8] said:
“…I note that the terminology frequently deployed in arguments to this court and, no doubt to those at first instance, omit a significant element of the test as framed by both the Supreme Court and this court, which qualifies the literal interpretation of “nothing else will do”. That is, the orders are to be made “only in exceptional circumstances and where motivated by the overriding requirements pertaining to the child’s best interests.” (See In Re B, paragraph 215)….”
In Re M (A Child) (Long Term Foster Care) [2014] EWCA Civ 1406 Black LJ said:
“What is necessary is a complex question requiring an evaluation of all of the circumstances. As Lord Neuberger said at [77] of Re B, speaking of a care order which in that case would be very likely to result in the child being adopted:
“It seems to me inherent in section 1(1) [Children Act 1989] that a care order should be the last resort, because the interests of the child would self- evidently require her relationship with her natural parents to be maintained unless no other course was possible in her interests. ” (my emphasis)
I emphasise the last phrase of that passage (“in her interests”) because it is an important reminder that what has to be determined is not simply whether any other course is possible but whether there is another course which is possible and in the child’s interests.”
With respect, I agree.
It is in the very nature of placement proceedings that in many of them there will be alternative options that are at least hypothetically feasible and which may have some merit. The fact that, after consideration of the evidence, the court on an analysis of the options chooses adoption over another option does not mean that such a choice is tainted because something else may have been reasonable and available. The whole purpose of a proportionality evaluation is to respect the rights that are engaged and cross check the welfare evaluation i.e. the decision is not just whether A is better than B, it is also whether A can be justified as an interference with the rights of those involved. That is of critical importance to the way in which evidence is collated and presented and the way in which the court analyses and evaluates it.
My answers to the questions posed by Mr Rowley are as follows:
a) The judge’s methodology was right. She conducted a fact finding exercise, a welfare analysis of each realistic option, a comparative welfare evaluation and a proportionality evaluation.
b) The statutory tests are not re-drawn. ‘Nothing else will do’ is the conclusion of a proportionality evaluation after a process of deductive reasoning not a new presumption and not a standard of proof.
c) It is not necessary to have a contingency in a care plan although it is desirable. A timetable within which a local authority have to implement a substantive order once proceedings have concluded is beyond the jurisdiction of the court and is not part of the prescribed content of a care plan.
d) Recognising the possibility of failure by a contingency plan is appropriate. That is quite different from deciding that something other than adoption is required.
e) There is no objection in principle to dual planning in an appropriate case. This case was appropriate because the placement decision was neither conditional upon the happening of an event nor the success of some extraneous process such as therapy. It was not a decision that one of two options would do.
I think the CoA go further here than in the last two cases – in those, there was still a concept that “nothing else will do” being a test, albeit a more nuanced test in which the words meant “nothing else that will properly meet the needs of the child”
Here, they say explicitly
The fact that, after consideration of the evidence, the court on an analysis of the options chooses adoption over another option does not mean that such a choice is tainted because something else may have been reasonable and available
That’s not saying that the Court rejected the other options, or ruled them out, or concluded that they were not capable of meeting the child’s needs. That is outright saying that even with a reasonable and available option, adoption can still be the choice of the Court.
Although in saying
Recognising the possibility of failure by a contingency plan is appropriate. That is quite different from deciding that something other than adoption is required.
It was not a decision that one of two options would do.
Are they in fact saying that there WASN’T a judicial acceptance that long-term fostering was capable of meeting the child’s needs and that the Court was just approving the plan of adoption by rejecting all of the other options and that long-term fostering was not a plan, but a contingency in the care plan that the Court wasn’t required to consider?
That’s one way of reading the Court of Appeal’s answers to those questions which still IS compatible with the nuanced / glossed “nothing else will do” (there is no other option that is capable of meeting this child’s needs in a satisfactory way). I wouldn’t have much quarrel if the case had been decided in that narrow way – it seems to me that you could resolve it by deciding that adoption was the plan, making a Placement Order and advising the LA that a revocation application should be lodged if the plan is formally to be changed.
Let us be honest, in a care plan of “search for adoption for 6 months, if unsuccessful long-term foster care”, which of those two things is the ‘last resort’? It isn’t adoption, that’s the first preference. Long-term fostering there is the last resort. When the Court makes a Placement Order in those circumstances, it really isn’t saying that adoption is the last resort; it is saying that adoption is a better way of meeting the child’s needs than the other available alternative. [Which arguably just falls under s1 of the Children Act and is a good thing, but in that case, the talk of ‘last resort’ is a sham]
Why, one might almost think, if one was very cynical, that the fact that Re B looked like it was heading for the ECHR led the Court of Appeal to take pre-emptive action to bolster adoption before any ECHR decision “look, we’re being proportionate!” and now that we know Re B isn’t going to the ECHR and the practical import is being seen, there’s a backtrack.
I mean, I myself am not that sort of cynical person, so that of course isn’t what’s happened.
What has happened is that we naughty, dastardly lawyers have deliberately confused the Supreme Court and Court of Appeal saying that for the wording of the statute, “requires” means literally nothing else will do, and taken that to be a test to be followed, whereas all they meant was the quality of evidence needed for a Judge to be satisfied that the child’s welfare ‘requires’ that parental consent be dispensed with is higher.
And all of those successful appeals based on that point were… I’m afraid that my imagination is breaking down there and I can’t find a plausible explanation why those appeals were allowed if the position really is and always was what the Court of Appeal now say.
Why weren’t they rejecting all those appeals and saying “no, people have got this wrong, nothing else will do doesn’t mean that at all?”
If we can be honest again for a moment, imagine that a Judge in a Placement Order case in September 2013, or even September 2014 had said “I have been referred to the cases of Re B and Re B-S, but I don’t need to follow those and I am sticking to the law exactly as it was in 2012” would the Court of Appeal have backed that
Posted in adoption, case law and tagged altering the nothing else will do principle, blackburn, blackburn adoption case, cm v blackburn 2014, contingency plan, Court of Appeal, dual planning, gloss on statute, nothing else will do, placement order, Re B, Re BS, ryder lj, test for placement order. Bookmark the permalink.