C (A Child)

JUDGMENT

Lord Justice Hughes:

This is an appeal in care proceedings. It is contended that the judge was wrong to discharge a care order upon a 15 year old boy without sufficiently considering the possible future impact of the leaving care provisions.

The slightly unusual feature of the case is that, with a background of longstanding and unremitting hostility by mother to the idea of a care order, the case came back to the judge on her application to discharge the order, yet it is she who now contends that the judge ought not to have done so. Nevertheless, and although the guardian supported the discharge of the order before the judge, mother is supported today by counsel appearing on behalf of the child who has been able to take rather different instructions from those which had been available in the court below. Even if mother has no merit in any complaint from her own point of view that her belatedly formed wishes did not prevail, it is nevertheless necessary for the sake of the child to examine the question of whether the judge went wrong.

The mother has four sons by two different fathers. The eldest two are now 19 and seventeen and a half respectively. The third, J, born on 24 August 1993, is the subject of the present appeal. At the time the judge dealt with the application in April, J was four months short of his sixteenth birthday. There is, for completeness, also a younger son, W, born in August of 1996, who at the time of the hearing before the judge was not yet 13.

There is quite a long history of social services involvement from time to time. It began not later than 1993 when mother was approximately 30. There is in the background a good deal of parental conflict. Father was sometimes in trouble with the police, mother lost a job for allegedly stealing, the children were neglected, and successively their behaviour proved disruptive, aggressive and often untruthful. There was a period of about a year in 2003 to 2004 when mother was wholly absent, leaving the children with father.

In due course care proceedings were taken, and after a succession of interim orders which were made on the basis that the boys would be left at home on trial with mother, the younger three were removed after a contested hearing before the County Court in March of 2005. By then the eldest boy was rising 16 and beyond the power of the local authority to achieve anything helpful, because wherever he was placed he ran away back to the family home and there was supporte