W (A Child)

Judgment

Lord Justice Wilson:

With permission given by the recorder herself, a mother appeals against an order for shared residence made in favour of herself and the father by Miss Recorder Venters QC in the Bromley County Court on 17 September 2008. The subject of the application was their child, a girl, K, who was born on 21 October 2000 and so is now aged eight.

The parents were never married. They began a relationship as long ago as 1993, when the father was aged 29 and the mother was aged 23. K was born as a result of it, but, by the time of her birth, the parents had not begun to cohabit. Their cohabitation began in 2002 and ended in May 2006. Thereafter K lived primarily with the mother but, albeit with interruptions, she had substantial contact with the father.

It was one such interruption which precipitated the applications on behalf of the father which ultimately came before the recorder. For in June 2007 the mother ceased to allow the father to have contact with K on the basis that his time-keeping in relation to the arrangements for it had been unreliable. This complaint was rejected by the father, who accused the mother of stopping the contact because he had begun another relationship. At all events in September 2007 he issued applications under the Children Act 1989 (“the Act”) for orders for parental responsibility, for contact and for what he called “joint” residence and should have called “shared” residence.

At an initial hearing of the applications by a deputy district judge in October 2007 the mother agreed that the father’s contact should begin again, indeed on the basis of staying contact on alternate weekends. Analogous arrangements were made in a further interim order made by consent in April 2008.

In July 2008, however, the mother, by solicitors, indicated that she was again ceasing to make K available for the contact. She put forward two reasons, first that the father had taken K swimming in Dorset in dangerous circumstances and second that he had on occasions played too roughly with K, in particular by pinching her.

Three weeks after that second cessation of contact a CAFCASS officer interviewed K in the course of his enquiries referable to the father’s three outstanding applications. In his report dated 29 August 2008 the officer stated that K had a good relationship with the mother but had told him that she missed her contact with the father and wanted it to be reinstated. The officer also noted the mother’s allegations o