Coventry named as council ordered to pay £100k over withdrawn care proceedings

Coventry City Council has been named as the council ordered to pay £100,000 towards the public funding costs of parents involved in care proceedings that were subsequently withdrawn.

Judge Clifford Bellamy allowed the local authority to be identified following an application by the BBC. The broadcaster said the parents also wanted the council to be named.

Local Government Lawyer first reported on the case – X, Y and Z (Children), Re 2010 EWHC B12 (Fam) – in June. Over a six-month period, the council twice sought to persuade the court to authorise the immediate interim removal of the children over allegations of fabricated or induced illness, before it sought leave to withdraw the proceedings in their entirety.

The judge estimated that the proceedings were likely to have cost the Legal Services Commission some £380,000, with the council also incurring “no doubt substantial” costs.

Judge Bellamy said at the time that he was satisfied this was a case where it was appropriate to require the council to make a contribution to costs, with the local authority’s conduct of the case falling outside the band of what was reasonable.

The reasons he gave included that the authority had abandoned all of the matters relied upon in the original threshold document and had fallen below standards of best practice in the decision-making process that led to its application for interim care orders.

Colin Green, Director of Children, Learning and Young People at Coventry, described the case as complex and difficult, adding that the local authority’s priority had been the welfare of the children.

He added: “We accept that we made mistakes in the management of this case which we very much regret, particularly around our analysis of the 241-page forensic assessment provided by the medical expert instructed by all parties to carry out the assessment of the family in relation to fabricated or induced illness.

“This assessment, the judge concluded, did not include sufficient evidence of fabricated or induced illness as had been concluded by the medical expert. We also did not review the case effectively at other key points such as when the independent social work report was received. We did not step back to see the whole picture in a complex case with an enormous volume of material.”

Coventry has decided not to appeal the order to pay a contribution to the parents' legal costs. It did, however, argue against the media’s application to identify the council.

Green said: “We are concerned that this family could now be identified in their community, and this could cause them harm. This is a view shared by other agencies working with this family. We accept that the case and its outcome are matters of public interest.

“The judge subsequently allowed an anonymised judgement to be published in the family law reports in the light of the public interest in the case. The judge made the decision that the names of all the parties should not be identified as this could lead to identification of the children. At the time he considered such identification not to be in the children's interest.”

Green said that Coventry had changed the way it works in this kind of case "to make sure that we will not make the same mistakes again, and we continue offering help to the children."