Case No. Case-No.-CO-5942-2017

3. Before turning to the facts of this case, it is necessary for me to consider an important preliminary issue. 4.On reading the papers, I was concerned that the Council had not fully complied with its duty of candour and questioned at the beginning of the hearing whether the Court had been given an accurate account of the material facts. It was evident from the bundle that there were a large number of significant redactions in the documents and there were documents, especially the initial viability assessment, which were missing. I asked the Council to consider this and I am told that some 400 unredacted documents were provided to the Claimant’s legal team during the course of the lunchtime adjournment of the one-day hearing. I therefore allowed written submissions to be made on the question of whether there had been the omission of any material facts and compliance with the duty. 5.A clear warning had been given to the Council in the Claimant’s pre-action letters in December 2017 of the need to provide disclosure and to comply with the duty of candour. I had been assured by Mr Carter for the Council at the hearing that his solicitor had been through the unredacted documents the day before the hearing and had satisfied herself that the redactions were in connection with the other child (K’s cousin, M). This turned out to be incorrect and a different explanation has now been given. 6.The Court also has a witness statement dated 4 January 2018 from Tracey Low who has been the allocated social worker for K since 13 September 2017. Although she does not say so in her statement, other than giving the usual assurances that the contents of her statement are true and correct to the best of her knowledge and belief, as the allocated social worker she will have had access to the complete Council records concerning K for the last 7 months and consulted the files before making her statement. 7.No subsequent statement or disclosure was made prior to the hearing in line with the continuing duty to consider observance of the duty of candour.8.Unfortunately, my concerns turned out to be well-founded and from the documents disclosed and the written submissions made to me following the hearing, it is clear that an accurate picture of the material facts was not provided by the Council. This is not disputed by the Council. The Council explains in its written submissions that it did not have appropriate procedures in place to enable the lawyers to be sure that the duty had been complied with. There must have been inadequate supervision of the drafting of Ms Low’s statement to ensure it dealt with the material facts. Indeed, the statement I have been provided on disclosure says nothing about Ms Low’s access to, and account of, the documents or the checking of the statement of Ms Low by the legal team or what advice she was given about compliance with the duty of candour. If the legal team did not have access to all the documents until 30 April as I am told, then they cannot have properly supervised the drafting of the witness statement on 4 January.9.I am told that the Council’s Legal Department does not have direct access to client records, that Social Services keep records in multiple files, and the Legal Department is dependent on the provision of the information through the Data Protection Team. The documents were requested by the Council’s legal department on 18 January (2 weeks after the filing of Ms Low’s statement). It appears that despite several reminders both from the Claimant’s solicitors, and internally, a set of unredacted papers (including the viability assessment) was not provided to Ms Malik, instructing Mr Carter, until the day before the hearing. In the time available, contrary to what I was told in Court, she had no time to go through them (they were not in the same order as the redactions apparently) before the hearing began. I am told that the non-disclosure in this case was not deliberate and that it -“is of grave concern to the Defendants who are anxious to ensure that the same thing does not happen in the future. It maybe that staff have been overly cautious during the redaction process. A full investigation will be undertaken by the various different departments to ascertain the cause of this failure.”10.The difficulties encountered cannot justify the failure by Social Services, the witness and the Council’s Legal Department properly to review the material disclosed or referred to especially since it was requested by the Claimant’s legal team from the outset and the Council had 4 months between the making of the claim and the hearing. The new/unredacted documents include material which goes to the Council’s asserted reasonable conclusions in respect of its statutory duties in this case. I do not know why those documents were not reviewed by either the Council’s legal team or counsel before the case began. I was not asked for time before the case started to allow the documents to be reviewed.11.Since this case concerns duties owed to vulnerable children, latterly young adults, I find this lack of effective procedures to ascertain the facts and obtain relevant documents from the department concerned to be disturbing taken with the very late concession (on the day of the hearing) that, despite resistance for over 4 months following the issue of proceedings, a duty under s. 20 had arisen at least for a period of time and that ground 1 was not contested.12.There can be no excuse for this poor compliance given the previous decisions by the Court emphasising the “very high duty on public authority respondents” (e.g.