Re A (A Child) [2025] EWCA Civ 424 – Court of Appeal Success for Frances Heaton KC and Clodagh Maguire
In re A (A Child) [2025] EWCA Civ 424, Clodagh Maguire represented a mother who supported her two-year-old child remaining in the long-term care of the child’s grandmother and successfully opposed the local authority plan of adoption. The local authority appealed, questioning the Judge’s assessment of future risk to the child remaining in the grandmother’s care, particularly in her teenage years, given there had been a failure by the grandmother to protect the mother from sexual exploitation when the mother was a teenager. Clodagh Maguire appeared at both the hearing in Manchester CJC and in the Court of Appeal hearing. In the Court of Appeal, Clodagh was led by Frances Heaton KC. The Court of Appeal dismissed the Local Authority appeal.
Key Points
1. Frances Heaton KC submitted that the evidence did not justify the conclusion that the future risk of sexual exploitation would eventuate or that there was a sufficient risk of it occurring as to justify placing the child for adoption.
Lord Justice Moylan considered that ‘the judge rightly recognised that the potential risk was a possibility not a certainty. In coming to these conclusions, she rejected the Local Authority’s case that the grandmother was not capable of developing her understanding and skills so as to be able to protect the child from this potential risk of harm in the future… The judge decided that the profound harm which would be caused by removing the child from the grandmother and her family where she is “thriving and happy” … was not proportionate to and necessitated by the “identified risk” of harm. This was a decision which was open to the judge and which she has sufficiently explained and justified.’
The Court of Appeal therefore upheld the Judge’s risk analysis applying Re F (A Child) (Placement Order: Proportionality) [2019] 1 FLR 779 and H-W (Children) (No 2) (2022) UKSC 17, cases which reiterate the need for the court’s analysis to be sufficient to demonstrate the basis on which the court had reached its decision and that the court had adequately addressed the relevant factors.
2. In dismissing a further ground of appeal wherein the Local Authority suggested that the Judge’s welfare analysis to reject the plan of adoption was rendered flawed without having awaited the more detailed supervision order support plan that she had directed, Lord Justice Moylan held at Paragraph 96 that in care proceedings “If one party considers that further evidence is necessary, they must make the appropriate application”.
3. At paragraph 82 in supporting the Judge’s decision to adjourn for a Supervision Order support plan having rejected the plan of adoption, prior to making a final order, Lord Justice Moylan referred to the Supervision Order Report published in April 2023 by the President of the Family Division’s Public Law Working Group. This contained “Recommendations to achieve best practice in the child protection and family justice systems: Supervision orders” wherein at [151(iv)] it was provided that “The supervision support plan must be approved by the court before a supervision order is made”.
Instructed by Stephenson’s solicitors.
Contact our clerks by email or call 0161 214 1500 if you wish to instruct Frances Heaton KC and Clodagh Maguire.
