Abstract
Application under Article 57(6) of the Children (Northern Ireland) Order 1995 for Assessment
The High Court O’Hara J
Delivered 9 March 2017
This case concerned the future care arrangements for M, a very young male child who had spent virtually all his life in care. M was born to C who had since transgendered and was now known as J; the identity of M’s actual father was unknown. The plaintiff was a Health and Social Care Trust whose care plan was being challenged by the respondent J, who applied to the court for accelerated access to a rehabilitation programme. O’Hara J was requested to rule on the application brought by J.
J, as C, had been on the Child Protection Register as a child, suffered from ADHD and had a recent history of drug abuse and mental health problems. These issues had improved considerably in 2016, prompting the Trust to reconsider a decision taken earlier that year, following the unsuccessful conclusion of a rehabilitation programme in a residential unit, ruling out rehabilitation of M to J. O’Hara J noted that J had recognised and accepted the issues at that time and agreed that M be taken into care.
At a subsequent case review in the High Court the Trust proposed to engage J in its Home on Time assessment scheme. J had consented but wanted reassurance that after M moved to concurrent carers time would be allowed for settling in before the actual start of the assessment. As O’Hara J explained: Home on Time is an assessment scheme which is now advanced by all Trusts in Northern Ireland. It involves placing a child with concurrent carers who are approved to foster and adopt children in the event that those children cannot return to the birth family. The thrust of the scheme is to reach decisions about the future of children earlier and avoid multiple disruptive placements of children which can be very damaging to them. The birth parent is assured of intensive work to address whatever the areas of concern are during the assessment. There is also regular contact for the parent with the child for the duration of the assessment. If sufficient progress is made, the parent is better placed to seek the return of the child. If such progress is not made within a reasonable time, the concurrent carers are more likely to become long-term carers and potentially adoptive parents provided that the placement of the child with them is progressing satisfactorily. The scheme is not activated in cases in which the prospects for the parents are regarded as hopeless by Trusts. It is only used in cases in which social workers have very serious concerns about the parents' ability to provide an acceptable level of care for the child within a reasonable timeframe but recognise that there is at least some prospect of parental progress. Accordingly the scheme gives a parent such as J the opportunity to prove that, with appropriate advice and support, he can make and maintain improvement to a sufficient degree to provide good enough long-term consistent parenting for M.
Early in 2017, M was placed with his concurrent carers and it was agreed that the assessment would commence six weeks later. However, less than a month into the placement an application was made on behalf of J to move M from the concurrent carers, with whom he had settled well, to the residential unit for the purposes of a second assessment, on the grounds that J was now better placed to show that he could care for M. While accepting that there was some truth in that contention, O’Hara J was of the view that the real basis for the application rested on issues raised by J about how the very early pre-assessment stages of the Home on Time project had gone, which had resulted in J’s wish to bring it to an end. He summarised and commented on the concerns raised by J as follows: (i) That he doesn’t have, or doesn’t yet have, the same good relationship with the concurrent carers as he had with the couple who fostered M for the last year. I do not regard this as an issue of any substance. I would not expect him to have the equivalent relationship, certainly not at this stage. By all accounts the previous foster carers were unusually open and accessible. That may or may not develop with the concurrent carers as time goes on (hopefully it will) but it is not critical and it cannot be the basis for an application to bring the current assessment to an end. (ii) His trust in social workers has been broken as a result of a ‘lie’ told by a contact worker after an incident on 21 February 2017. Before that day’s contact started, the contact worker encouraged J himself to ask questions to the concurrent carers when they arrived with M, e.g. how M had slept, when did M last eat, what sort of form was M in. Despite this advice J did not engage with them – it was left to the contact worker to ask these obvious and important questions. The carers then left and returned towards the end of contact to collect M. When the contact worker saw them, she said words to the effect, ‘there’s the parents’ or, according to J, ‘there’s mum and dad’. J was rightly upset and exercised about this. That language was inappropriate and hurtful. However the contact worker herself then did three things: (a) She apologised on the spot to J. (b) She included this incident in her record of the contact. (c) She reported what she had said to the senior practitioner. I conclude that in light of those steps there has been a gross overreaction by J to this incident. I am concerned that it has been exaggerated by J in order to justify terminating the Home on Time assessment. (iii) There are other general concerns about how contact starts and ends and where the handover should be. None of these is or should be especially difficult to make progress on and none of them touches on whether Home on Time should continue.
O’Hara J commented that the application required the removal of M from concurrent carers within weeks of him being placed with them and after J had been on notice for more than two months of that intended move. As a further move at this point would inevitably be disruptive for M, and contrary to his best interests, O’Hara J rejected the application. He went on to observe that the failure of the initial assessment had shown that J, as C, had been unable to provide consistent and stable emotional care for M. The current assessment would allow him to show that he is more stable than before and, if he does prove that, then the possibility of rehabilitation of M to his care would increase. The closing words of his judgment were, however, reserved for the Trust. O’Hara J warned that: It will be interesting to see how the Home on Time project develops. It is a relatively new scheme which has its attractions but this Trust (and all Trusts) should appreciate that unless the scheme results in an appreciable number of children being rehabilitated questions will be raised about it. It is important that it does not just become a mechanism for speeding up care and freeing applications by setting parents up to fail.
Held
Application rejected.
Comment
The slip-up by the social worker was undeniably disastrous in terms of cultivating the necessary trust in her working relationship with J, but it was no more than that – a wholly understandable mistake, which she managed professionally. It does, however, illustrate the very real difficulties involved in holding a neutral position in a concurrent parenting programme. Such schemes, piloted by some Trusts over recent years, have now been mainstreamed and rebranded as the Home on Time programme to be delivered by all Trusts across Northern Ireland.
The greatest strength of the programme is, arguably, also its greatest weakness. By making a placement with foster carers who are also approved as potential adopters, selected on the basis of being the most suitable to provide for the needs of that specific child, the risk of disruption is minimised, the child has every opportunity to form crucial attachments and the Trust has time to assess the placement as one that may lead to adoption. But from the moment of placement the clock is ticking against parental rehabilitation. The parent has a brief window in which to overcome the skill deficiency that led to the placement, demonstrate a capacity to provide safe care and hope to displace the alternative bonding process being rapidly established. Any parental challenge to the Trust programme during that window can be met by the argument that the attachments formed in the placement have now become a factor crucial to the child’s welfare.
O’Hara J’s warning seems appropriate. Adoption statistics will show whether Trust resources have been invested in an even-handed manner: to enable rather than to time out parental rehabilitation.