What happened to putting children’s interests first?

Lawyers have lately been celebrating the 25th anniversary of the coming into force of the 1989 Children Act, hailed when it was introduced as “the most far-reaching and comprehensive reform of child law to have come before Parliament in living memory”. Its central principle, which must since have been paraphrased by lawyers a million times, is that the welfare of the child must be their “paramount consideration”. And in 1992/93 the government reported on how splendidly the Act was working in practice.

The report’s preface, signed by Virginia Bottomley, stated that it was now recognised that “the best place by 2020, it has been estimated by Lord Justice Munby, head of the family courts, that new care applications could have doubled again, to 25,000 a year.

Comparing the claims of that 1992/93 report with what actually goes on in our “child protection” system today, one whistles with disbelief. It claimed, for instance, that “a child’s voice must be heard when decisions about their future are being taken”, that “the welfare of children being looked after when away from home” must be “properly safeguarded”, that local authorities must “promote contact” between children in care and their families.

But in all the hundreds of cases I have followed over the years, it would be hard to count how often each of these principles has been outrageously flouted: where judges have refused to allow unhappy children their legal right to express their own wishes in court; where children in care too often suffer far worse abuse than anything alleged against their parents, where loving parents are only allowed “contact” with their children under such dehumanised conditions that it is no more than a horrible ordeal.

Even when grandparents or other family members are only too keen to look after children removed from parents ruled unfit to keep them, social workers and the courts almost invariably prefer to farm them out to the care of strangers, at a cost of £3 billion a year. It is hard to think of any other statute which in practice has been reduced to such a cruel mockery of its original noble intentions. Autumn 2017 perhaps? The Met Office’s new ‘supercomputer’ may have a better chance of forecasting glorious seasons like this than did its predecessor