What happened in this case
17.The application for an interim care order was issued on Wednesday 22 March 2023 and referred to me. I listed it for a hearing before me the following day. The proceedings were allocated to me because I had dealt with the two older children of the family. I observe at this stage that if I had not been sitting last week, the interim care order application would have been heard by any full or part time judge sitting at East London Family Court. 18.I read the initial social work statement and the local authority’s interim threshold document on the day the proceedings were issued. It was immediately obvious that they presented a misleading impression of the history. 19.I therefore sent a message through the Family Public Law portal and East London’s listing team to request that the local authority include in the bundle for the ICO hearing a copy of all judgments given in the previous proceedings. It appears that the papers provided to Newham by Tower Hamlets were incomplete and did not include, in particular, the March 2021 judgment. The only documents from the previous proceedings that were included in the bundle were the bundle index and the LIFT assessment.20.The initial social work statement purported to summarise the evidence before the court in the previous proceedings. The following table compares some of the assertions contained in the social work statement filed in these proceedings to the finding in my judgment. 21.Shortly before the hearing on Thursday 23 March 2023 was due to start I received four position statements, one from each party. None of them referred to my judgment of March 2021. Passages in F’s position statement, under the heading “Previous Care Proceedings”, read:“[F] did not have a proper assessment with regard to his ability to care or his parenting skills. These have never been tested.[…]The court did not have sufficient evidence before it to rule out [F] as a parent who could care for the children… and therefore a further independent and proper assessment is necessary, which must be based on established or at least properly investigated facts…[…]In these proceedings the LA have relied on the LIFT assessment in the previous proceeding which the father argued then was fundamentally flawed, in that it relied on unsubstantiated facts which were not fully investigated.” 22.That was a repetition of F’s case, as it had been put during the hearing in March 2021. I had dealt with each of these arguments in my judgment. Paragraphs 63 to 86 dealt with the criticisms made by both parents of the LIFT assessment. Paragraphs 94 to 100 set out my overall impression of F’s evidence. Paragraphs 197 to 204 set out my conclusions about his parenting capacity. At paragraphs 75 and 76 I said:“75.I cannot accept that the LIFT assessment is not thorough. The multi-disciplinary approach meant that the parents’ capacity was considered from a much broader perspective than if this had been a simple parenting assessment carried out by a social worker. The report is lengthy, and is accompanied by detailed appendices setting out the work done with W, his foster carer and each of his parents […]76.As far as the father is concerned, in my judgement he had every possible opportunity to engage fully with the assessment process, and the issues relevant to his parenting capacity were raised with him and discussed in detail over the course of the assessment.”23.The ICO hearing was listed at the end of the day on Thursday 23 March. The position statements came in over the course of the day, when I was hearing evidence in a trial in a different case. I was unable to read them until immediately before the hearing. When the hearing commenced I raised the issue of the missing judgment. None of the advocates had seen it. When I told them what it contained, no one sought to argue that the hearing could be effective. It was re-listed the following day. 24.Because M did not book into hospital until quite late in her pregnancy with V, LB Newham only had a few weeks to prepare this application. I recognise that this local authority was not the local authority in the care proceedings for W and X. However it clearly had sufficient time to request the files from LB Tower Hamlets, and although the March 2021 judgment was missing it must have been obvious from those papers that a judgment had been delivered. The final bundle in W and X’s proceedings, which included my judgment, was and continues to be accessible on Caselines, the document management system used by a number of local authorities, and could have been made available to LB Newham at the press of a button. 25.F’s solicitor in these proceedings is the same solicitor who acted for him in the previous proceedings. M changed solicitors after the March 2021 hearing but her new solicitors acted for her later in those proceedings. V’s guardian was also the guardian for W and X. 26.The information contained in my March 2021 judgment was therefore available to all of the parties, or at least should have been, but was not before the court at the ICO hearing. 27.If the ICO hearing had been listed before a different Judge, as could easily have happened, there would have been no one in the courtroom (other than the parents) who actually knew what findings had and had not been made in the previous proceedings, and what view the court had taken of the expert evidence. At best, the court would have been presented with an unnecessarily conflicted and confusing picture. At worst, a decision of huge significance to V and his parents could have been taken on the basis of information that was simply wrong.