O (A Child)

Judgment

Lord Justice Wilson

A mother, appearing by Mr Horrocks of counsel, makes a renewed application for permission to appeal against two parts of an order made under the Children Act 1989 by HHJ Pearl on 24 March 2009. Today Mr Horrocks has placed before us a further order made in the proceedings by HHJ Pearl dated 11 September 2009. On the face of it the new order appears somewhat to change the landscape and to indicate that in a very serious way the mother has refused to comply with various of the arrangements made by the judge on 24 March 2009, indeed even including arrangements not the subject of attempted appeal today. I will return to the order dated 11 September but the focus of today’s application is, of course, the earlier order.

The child at the centre of the proceedings is a girl, A, who was born on 13 April 2004 and who is thus -- now -- aged five and a half years old. Her primary home has to date been with the mother. She lives in Colne, being a village not far from Huntingdon. The father lives in Kingston-upon-Thames.

The parents were never married and their relationship seems to have ended by the time of A’s birth. Litigation between them in relation to A began in 2005 and has continued at a high level, exhausting as well as expensive for the parties and probably damaging to A, for the period of four years until the judge’s order and indeed, as I have just indicated, apparently beyond the date thereof. Many of the hearings prior to March 2009 were also conducted by HHJ Pearl; and, in that at one stage A was made a ward of court, the proceedings moved into the High Court and the judge acted as a judge thereof. A herself was made a defendant to the proceedings and began to be presented by a senior Cafcass officer, Ms Bennett-Hernandez, as her guardian ad litem.

At some stage, apparently exasperated with the mother’s alleged failure to comply with arrangements for his contact with A, the father added an application for an order that A’s residence be vested in himself on the basis that, in that he works in the City, he would employ a nanny to help him to care for her.

By the time of the hearing before the judge, which began on 23 March and concluded on 24 March 2009, many of the issues between the parents had appeared to have been resolved. The father withdrew his application for a sole residence order in respect of A. The mother for her part accepted, or appeared to accept, that his contact with A, which had already begun on a staying