“If I make the child a ward then the interim care order has to be brought to an end. I could replace it with a supervision order, which would maintain the care proceedings in place, pending the final hearing, but the local authority would not have parental responsibility. While they would, as an interested party, be able to ask the court to act to protect its ward, they would have no direct locus with a Pakistani court. In reality, however, they intend to exercise continued parental responsibility, and to make the child a ward but to continue with the structure the authority propose would, in my judgment, amount to a fiction and exactly what s.100 was designed to avoid.”
“[55] It is difficult to understand why steps were not taken on3 February 2017 to consider effective access to justice for the grandparents. It was clear from the recordings in the order made that the key issues in the case included whether each of the children should 'reside in a family placement under an SGO'. It may be that the apparent consensus between the local authority, the children's guardian and the grandparents on the ultimate order they all sought obscured the immediate procedural issue before the court. Given the procedural unfairness that undoubtedly was the consequence, I have no hesitation in coming to the conclusion that it was wrong not to have made appropriate provision for the grandparents to obtain effective access to justice at the final hearing. To leave them on the sidelines without party status, without documents and without advice and without any mechanism being identified for the parents of S to cross-examine them on their proposals was unfair in more than one respect. From the children's perspective, it meant that part of their case was assumed to be incomplete when it could have been tested. [56] The solution would have been either to direct that an application for an SGO be made so that case management directions on that application relating to party status, disclosure and time for advice could be made or for case management directions to be made that otherwise secured the same procedural protections. At the IRH on3 February 2017 , the facts were such that the grandparents were a realistic option for the care of the children. The direction for an SGO assessment which is a mandatory precondition to the making of an order had been made and the reports were complete. I am accordingly at a loss to understand why directions were neither asked for nor made that dealt with how that application would be considered by the court. The consequence is stark even from the judge's own judgment. The grandparents did not know what was happening, did not have the evidence upon which the court was making a decision, were unable to take advice and in the event, in my judgment, did not have effective access to justice. That was not in the interests of the children. The procedure was accordingly unfair.”
“[46] Any judge who sits in the Family Division will be familiar with the depressing inadequacies and deficiencies in too many of the care plans presented to the court for its approval. A care plan is more than a statement of strategic objectives – though all too often even these are expressed in the most vacuous terms. A care plan is – or ought to be – a detailed operational plan. Just how detailed will depend upon the circumstances of the particular case. Sometimes a very high level of detail will be essential. But whatever the level of detail which the individual case may call for, any care plan worth its name ought to set out the operational objectives with sufficient detail – including detail of the 'how, who, what and when' – to enable the care plan itself to be used as a means of checking whether or not those objectives are being met. Nothing less is called for in a pathway plan. Indeed, the Regulations, as we have seen, mandate a high level of detail.”