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Lord Justice Wall:
This is the judgment of the court
Introduction
The North Somerset Council (the local authority) seeks permission to appeal against a case management decision made by Coleridge J sitting in this building on 24 April 2009. The appellant’s notice was not filed until 15 May 2009. On 21 May 2009 the papers were placed before Wilson LJ who directed that the application be heard on 10 June 2009 by a two judge court.
At the conclusion of the argument on that day, we announced our decision but reserved our reasons. We gave permission to appeal. We allowed the appeal. We set aside the judge’s refusal to permit the instruction of a paediatric pathologist and directed the local authority to identify such a pathologist as a matter of urgency, and, jointly with the other parties, to instruct that pathologist to review the post-mortem carried out on the child C by Dr C on 2 March 1999 and to answer the eight questions posed by Dr L in his report dated 7 March 2009.
As will already be apparent, this is a case which is ongoing, and in which we impose reporting restrictions. This judgment, which sets out our reasons for reaching the conclusions identified in the preceding paragraph, is thus written anonymously, and nothing must be published which in any way identifies the children with whom the court is concerned. In order to preserve the children’s anonymity, we propose also to anonymise the various doctors and other experts involved.
In listing the application for hearing, Wilson LJ adverted to the difficulty of appealing against a case management decision of a High Court Judge but added that the application “deserves ventilation at a hearing”. In addition to hearing leading and junior counsel for the applicant, we heard oral submissions on behalf of the father, the guardian and the intervener, and received skeleton arguments settled by leading and junior counsel on behalf of the mother, the father and the intervener. Unfortunately, the last two documents did not reach us prior to the hearing. We have, however, now read them and take the view that the points they contain were properly summarised by counsel in their oral submissions.
For the avoidance of any doubt, we make it clear that nothing in this judgment is to be taken or read as in any way indicating the likely outcome either of any further investigations, or of the case itself. As this judgment will make clear, we are dealing with a narrow, limited and discrete issue. There are, however,