B v Reading Borough Council & Ors

Judgment

Mr Justice Mackay:

Between 1990 and 1995 B went through the most terrible experience that a father can face, being falsely accused of sexually assaulting his three year old daughter. In 1995 a court found that no such abuse had occurred and he began the process of re-building his relationship with the child, in these proceedings named L. He says that the effect of those five and a half years has continued to blight his life and claims that responsibility for it in law lies with a social worker and a police officer who together investigated the allegation in its early stages.

L was initially a claimant, but soon after achieving her majority she returned to live with her mother and in due course filed notice discontinuing her claim, having told her solicitor that she did not recall past events and wanted to get on with her life. She is now 22.

The history of this litigation, as has been said before, does little credit to those concerned with its conduct. The proceedings in the Family Court took no less than five and a half years and 23 days of hearings to reach the conclusion that B had not abused L, and that contact between him and L should resume. The Queen’s Bench proceedings were begun by a writ issued in May 1998 and have taken 11 years to come to trial because of a combination of inertia, funding problems and heavy interlocutory activity involving two appeals to the Court of Appeal. This has meant that I am trying fact-sensitive allegations of great seriousness over a distance of 19 years. But before I deal with those facts in any detail there are issues of law I must decide, the answers to which will shape the case and the decisions I need to reach.

The background in brief

B is now 52 and met SJ in 1984. They formed a relationship, bought a house together and on 16 February 1987 their daughter L was born.

When L was 16 months old they separated, their relationship having broken down. For the first nine months or so B enjoyed regular contact with L by agreement, but further differences arose between B and SJ which resulted in that contact becoming infrequent and at times non-existent.

After a period of contact in January 1990 SJ began to raise the possibility that B had sexually abused L. That led to the events which have been the subject of intense and necessary focus in this trial. The outcome was that L was placed on the At Risk Register, SJ cut all contact between B and his family and L, and private and public law care proceedings