L-S (Child)

Judgment Approved

Lady Black:

The proposed appellant (hereafter “the mother”) is the mother of a child, B, who is now 12 years old. She seeks permission to appeal against orders made in 2016, in proceedings concerning B, by HHJ Wilding. The hearing before us was a combined hearing of the application for permission with the appeal to follow if permission were to be granted.

In order to explain the nature of the orders under appeal, I will need to go back into the history of the case but, for the moment, it is enough to state that the mother wishes to appeal against three decisions made by Judge Wilding pursuant to a hearing in June 2016. They are:

the judge’s refusal, by order of 17 June 2016, to direct the disclosure to the mother of records of B’s therapeutic contact with an adolescent resource centre (“ARC”);

the judge’s refusal to re-open findings of fact which he had made in January 2015 concerning B’s allegations that his father and paternal grandfather had sexually abused him;

the judge’s order of 12 August 2016 providing for B to live with the father, with limited supervised contact with the mother.

Judge Wilding has had conduct of the case throughout all of its recent history and has given a number of judgments. He explained his reasoning for his decision about the ARC records in a judgment given on 17 June 2016 and his reasoning for the other two decisions in a reserved judgment which was apparently handed down in August 2016 but is marked as amended on 5 October 2016 (“the October 2016 judgment”).

The history up to the commencement of care proceedings

B has been the subject of litigation for a number of years. It began with private law proceedings which were commenced following the separation of his mother and father in 2011. The detail of those proceedings is well known to the parties already and does not need setting out here.

The upshot of the private law proceedings was that an order was made for B to live with the mother and to have contact with the father. The contact progressed to overnight stays. In mid-September 2013, the mother made an application to vary the contact order. She complained in the application that the father was, as she saw it, misinterpreting the contact order so as to permit overnight stays at the paternal grandparents’ home, which she considered was not allowed in the light of concerns she held regarding the behaviour of the paternal grandfather. She said in the application that B had told her that his grandf