Sir Andrew McFarlane, President of the Family Division:
1.This is an unusual judgment. It has been handed down following a case management hearing in pending public law child care proceedings under Children Act 1989, s 31 [CA 1989]. The proceedings relate to the sibling of a 4 month old baby who died in suspicious circumstances in October 2021 following a profound collapse at the family home four days earlier. In the event, all of the directions sought at the case management hearing were resolved by agreement and, because of that, no hearing took place. In due course I endorsed an agreed consent order and remitted the case for hearing before the allocated judge, Mr Justice MacDonald.2.Against that background, it will be plain that this judgment does not record any judicial decision whatsoever and, as such, nothing that is said in the paragraphs that follow can be taken as binding authority for any proposition. The judgment is, therefore, simply a narrative account of the problem that caused the case to be transferred to me, as President of the Family Division, for hearing, together with a distillation of the various solutions, put forward by counsel, seeking to address a significant problem which occurs in cases which concern child homicide in the Family Court. At the conclusion I will offer my own view on how such cases might proceed in the future. I repeat that, legally, what I may say is no more than a record of my current view, having considered the issues. How a future case should proceed will be a matter for the judge hearing that case, subject to any appeal. The solutions put forward to this court are untried and untested. In the event they may not be practicable or meet the needs of any future case. My purpose in capturing and recording them is to alert all concerned, in this public judgment, to the existence of a very serious problem, and to offer ideas that may assist in ameliorating its impact on future Family proceedings. As I will record, I am clear, as Head of Family Justice, it is no longer tenable for the Family Court simply to put up with the impact of this problem.