A mother asked social services for help in looking after her nine-year-old daughter who had been displaying some “modest behavioural difficulties”. The mother also wanted a doctor to examine her daughter because she had been complaining of a tummy ache. The result of social services’ intervention was that, without consulting the girl’s parents, they obtained an Emergency Protection Order. Uniformed policemen arrived and forcibly took the child away. The child was prevented from seeing her parents for 14 months as a consequence. During that time she was placed in foster care. Her foster carers changed repeatedly. There was every indication that the council would not allow the girl ever to see her parents again. It was only when her parents managed to appeal to the High Court, and Mr Justice McFarlane was able to scrutinise the evidence, or rather the lack of it, that they were able to get the care order overturned and to get their child back.

Judge McFarlane patiently identified the “multiple failures” of both the social services and the courts in this case. He noted that when social services applied to the courts for an Emergency Protection Order [EPO] “every single one of the [13] elements of the team manager’s evidence was misleading, incomplete or wrong”. He added that “the picture given to the magistrates by the team manager was ... so seriously distorted that it is likely to have led the bench to have a totally erroneous view of the issues in this case”.

The court was supposed to scrutinise that picture. It failed to do so. It made no attempt at all to test social services’ claims about the dangers that leaving the child with its parents would pose. When the court upheld the request for an EPO, they did not give any reasons for the decision. The bench simply endorsed the claims made by social services officials. Yet when Mr Justice McFarlane asked them “what was the imminent danger that [the child] faced” on the afternoon she was taken into care, he found that “not one of them could give a satisfactory reply. The team manager could only repeatedly assert, ‘I could not say that the child was 100 per cent safe in that household’.” As Mr Justice McFarlane pointed out, this is “nothing like the test needed to justify an EPO”, not least because it is a test which could justify taking every child in the country from its parents — no home anywhere is “100 per cent safe”. But the court accepted it as appropriate grounds on which to remove a nine-year-old child from her parents.