Well – DUUR!!

News just in from the FLBA: The Report from Francis Plowden – the Review of Court Fees in Child Care Proceedings – was published yesterday. Francis Plowden recommends (unsurprisingly?) abolition of fees for Local Authorities bringing child care proceedings. The Government has accepted this recommendation, and will implement it in April 2011 alongside the next three-year funding settlement [...]

Protecting All Children – jus’ like that

Jill Kirby, Director of the Centre for Policy Studies writes a piece in the Opinion section of Wednesday’s Times entitled ‘It’s not hard to spot the children really at risk’. Self evidently it is a little harder than we would like to think or we wouldn’t have had to add Baby P to a long list of other [...]

Rise in Child Abuse Calls

The NSPCC has seen a dramatic increase in calls about suspected child abuse since Baby P – referrals from the NSPCC to the police or social services are up by a third in two years. I was astonished to read that between April 2008 and March 2009 the NSPCC passed on 11,243 suspected child protection [...]

O-VER-LOAD! [Dalek voice effect]

The Guardian reports that 7% of CAFCASS Guardian appointments in care cases are unallocated. That is 653 of a total of 9060 cases. The only surprise there is that the figure for unallocated cases is so low. You can’t get a Guardian for love nor money round these here parts, and Judges have all but [...]

Fear or Favour

Camilla Cavendish writes an excellent article about (amongst other things) the tendency towards back-covering in child protection and the consequent fear of professionals that many good parents now have. She is right – I am anxious each time I take my son to the GP for a routine appointment that whatever minor knock or scrape he may [...]

Red Light for Children’s Databases

A report published by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust this week entitled ‘The Database State – Scrap it Fix it or Keep it?’ has given the ‘red light’ on privacy grounds to several databases used to track children for child protection purposes, namely ContactPoint (details of every child in the country and who is working [...]

Laming Report Published

Lord Laming’s Report in the wake of the Baby P tragedy was published this week. It can be found here. Of particular relevance to family lawyers Lord Laming recommends an urgent review of the £4,000 fees for the issue of care proceedings and that steps should be taken to reduce the average case length in [...]

Baby P Sacking Legal Actions Commence

Sharon Shoesmith has commenced not one but two legal actions in connection with her dismissal from Haringey over the Baby P case – judicial review and employment tribunal, the Guardian reports.

Making a meal of it

Myself and another legal rep were a little taken aback to be told recently that we were ‘making a meal of it’, ‘it’ being the alleged assaults by a father upon his children by blows to the head. Not – apparently - a child protection concern because the kids, now just in double digits, don’t present as frightened. Well [...]

Computer says ‘NO’

I’ve often read s47 reports, core assessments and reg 38 assessments which find themselves in amongst my case papers and wondered what purpose they serve other than to obfuscate questions of risk.  Chatting the other week with a social worker confirms anecdotally at least that some social workers agree. These documents are ridiculously long and [...]