mckinneywrites

[mckinneywrites]

Alfie Evans case: Supreme Court’s reasons for refusing permission to appeal

Alfie Evans is a 22-month-old boy on life support in Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. Doctors at the hospital wish to withdraw treatment as no longer in his best interests and give only palliative care. Alfie’s parents disagree. On 22 February a High Court judge backed the decision of the hospital. Today the Supreme Court refused permission for Alfie’s parents to appeal that decision. As its reasons for the refusal are not on the Supreme Court website at time of writing, I reproduce them in full below.

BETWEEN THOMAS EVANS AND KATE JAMES

Appellants

AND

ALDER HEY CHILDREN’S NHS FOUNDATION TRUST

First Respondent

AND

ALFIE EVANS (by his Children’s Guardian)

Second Respondent

1. Mr Thomas Evans and Ms Kate James (“the parents”) seek permission to appeal to the Supreme Court against the order of the Court of Appeal dated 6 March 2018.

2. Under this court’s Practice Direction 3.3.3 the court will give permission for an appeal to be brought only if it would raise an arguable point of law of general public importance.

3. On 20 February 2018 Mr Justice Hayden determined Alder Hey’s application by reference to his assessment of Alfie’s best interests. He declared that it was no longer in his best interests for ventilation to be provided to him. It followed that it was not lawful for ventilation to continue to be provided to him, whether at Alder Hey or anywhere else. So the judge proceeded to declare that it was lawful and in his best interests that Alfie be extubated, that ventilatory support be withdrawn from him and that he receive only palliative care.

4. The Court of Appeal dismissed the appeal of the parents against the declarations made by Mr Justice Hayden and in doing so held that he had been correct to make them by reference to his assessment, which the Court of Appeal endorsed, of where Alfie’s best interests lay. 

5. The parents accept that they cannot bring to this court a challenge to the conclusion that it is in Alfie’s best interests for his ventilation to be withdrawn. That would not have raised any point of law. Anyway, in this profoundly tragic and painful case, there was a mass of evidence, including from experts instructed on behalf of the parents, which justified the judge’s conclusion. 

6. But the parents do raise a point of law which the Court of Appeal rejected and which they wish to put before this court. The question for us at this stage is whether the point is arguable. 

7. The point is developed on behalf of the parents by Mr Knafler QC and his two juniors in lengthy sections of the Notice of Appeal; and we pay tribute to their industry and to the clarity of their exposition. 

8. It is wrong (say the parents) for an issue such as the present to be determined by reference only to a child’s best interests. The law of England and Wales is (they say) illogical and the Supreme Court must set it right. The first question should (according to them) be whether their proposals for Alfie’s future care would cause him to be likely to suffer “significant harm”. And they cast these arguments within a complaint that, in the enjoyment of their right to respect for their family life under article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the courts have discriminated against them contrary to article 14. 

9. We should add here that the parents’ proposals for Alfie’s future care are that, with continued ventilation, he should be transported by air ambulance to a hospital in Rome and later, perhaps, from there to a hospital in Munich, for further treatment; that in one or other of the hospitals he should undergo a tracheostomy and a gastrostomy in order perhaps to enable ventilation to be given in a home environment; that consideration should therefore be given to his living with them in one or other of those countries, close to hospital support; but that if, after about six months, there remained no prospect of improvement in his condition, they would, with whatever degree of difficulty, accept withdrawal of his life support. It follows from what we have already said that the judge found the parents’ proposals not to be in Alfie’s best interests. He found, with obvious sadness, that they would achieve nothing. But he was not asked to consider whether they would cause Alfie “significant harm” and so he made no finding to that effect. So the parents are entitled to say that it has never been established that their proposals would be likely to cause significant harm to Alfie, particularly in circumstances in which, on the evidence, it is unlikely, albeit possible, that he has an awareness of pain. 

10. So on what basis do the parents say that it is wrong and illogical for the present issue not to be decided by reference, in the first instance, to a concept of significant harm? 

11. If a child was in the care of a local authority under a care order and in hospital with a condition such as that of Alfie and if the parents disputed the course proposed by the local authority (and presumably by the hospital), section 100 (3) and (4) of the Children Act 1989 would disable the local authority from applying to the court for a declaration unless there was reasonable cause to believe that otherwise the child would be likely to suffer significant harm. One difficulty with this scenario is that it is highly unlikely that the local authority would be the applicant. It is much more likely that the application would be made by the hospital, to which section 100 would not apply. 

12. But the parents suggest a wider analogy, in particular with proceedings for a care order but also with adoption proceedings. Section 31 of the Children Act disables a court from granting a care order to a local authority unless the child has suffered or is likely to suffer significant harm, attributable to care below a level which it would be reasonable to expect a parent to give. Here, in the panel’s view, one reaches the nub of the parents’ argument. If significant harm (or its likelihood) has to be established before a child can be removed – perhaps only temporarily – from the home of his parents under a care order, why does it not need to be established before he can be removed, permanently, from them and from everything in this world, by death? 

13. A child, unlike most adults, lacks the capacity to make a decision in relation to future arrangements for him. Where there is an issue in relation to them, the court is there to take the decision for him as it is for an adult who lacks that capacity. 

14. The gold standard, by which most of these decisions are reached, is an assessment of his best interests. The first provision in the Children Act is that the child’s welfare shall be the court’s paramount consideration. Parliament’s provision reflects international instruments, particularly the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. And in the Human Rights Convention, the rights of a child under article 8 will, if inconsistent with the rights of his parents, prevail over them. 

15. But Parliament has provided that in care proceedings there should be an initial hurdle, namely the establishment of significant harm or its likelihood, attributable to the parents, before an assessment of the child’s best interests can be reached. For in such proceedings a powerful extra objective is in play, namely to avoid social engineering. These are proceedings by the state to remove a child from his parents. Families need protection from too ready a removal of him. It might be arguable that a child growing up in many households today would be better off elsewhere. But Parliament has provided that that should not be a strong enough reason for removing him. Significant harm must be established. 

16. The present proceedings are quite different; and the gold standard needs to apply to them without qualification. Doctors need to know what the law requires of them. The founding rule is that it is not lawful for them (or any other medical team) to give treatment to Alfie which is not in his interests. A decision that, although not in his best interests, Alfie’s continued ventilation can lawfully continue because (perhaps) it is not causing him significant harm would be inconsistent with the founding rule. 

17. We are satisfied that the current law of England and Wales is that decisions about the medical treatment of children, like those about the medical treatment of adults, are governed by what is in their best interests. We are also satisfied that this does not discriminate against the parents of children such as Alfie in the enjoyment of their right to respect for their family life because their situation is not comparable with that of the parents of children who are taken away from them by the state to be brought up elsewhere. 

18. The proposed appeal is unarguable so, notwithstanding our profound sympathy for the agonising situation in which they find themselves, we refuse permission for the parents to appeal.

20 March 2018

Lady Hale 

Lord Kerr 

Lord Wilson

[mckinneywrites]

Social media law: a new practice area?

Way back in 2017 I was asked to write a feature on whether there is such a thing as “social media law”. It will appear in this month’s issue of Verdict magazine, published by the University of Law for its students.

The editors were particularly keen that I get a take from Greg Callus of 5RB chambers. Greg appeared for Jack Monroe in the successful Twitter libel action against Katie Hopkins; permission to appeal was refused Ms Hopkins today.

That proved to be an excellent recommendation. Greg put a lot of time into producing thoughtful answers to my rather vague questions, but in the nature of these things you only manage to fit a line or two from each into the finished article. That seemed a shame. So with his permission, here is the interview in full.

Q: Is social media creating work for practitioners in your field?

A: Back in the day, you had to own a newspaper or run a broadcaster to reach a really large audience. There are still libel claims against newspapers, but they are tough to win: newspapers have proper editorial processes and expensive lawyers, and an ideological attachment to freedom of expression. But now anyone on Facebook or Twitter can probably reach a few thousand publishees, and high-profile people can have millions of followers. It stands to reason that the profile of defamation and privacy work is shifting, with a higher proportion of claims brought involving social media than ever before.

Q: Have high profile cases made people more conscious of the legal consequences of online behaviour?

A: Back in the day, people talked about the internet as the new ‘Wild West’: largely anonymous and lawless. I’m not sure that was ever true, but it certainly isn’t now. We've known since at least McAlpine v Bercow [2014] EMLR 3 (libel) and Chambers v Director of Public Prosecutions [2013] 1 WLR 1833 (the 'Twitter Joke Trial') that there is no suspension of the general civil and criminal law while on social media. But many people still don’t seem to appreciate that online abuse and trolling can have real-world consequences: in defamation, in harassment, even in criminal law. The data trail that we all leave nowadays also means that very few people are truly capable of being anonymous online.

Q: Is there such thing as "social media law"?

A: Not really. It’s still criminal law, or the law of defamation, or harassment, or copyright, or privacy, just using a particular mode of telecommunications. It’s all about information: the law of who controls it, and who should have access to it. There is a new ‘Media & Communications List’ in the Queen’s Bench Division, which will specialise in the torts of libel, slander, breach of confidence, misuse of private information, and data protection.  That makes sense as a specialism, but while I’d expect all the big social media brands to be regular litigants there, many of those cases in the new list will be far-removed from social media. They could be breach of confidence cases involving utilities companies, or data protection cases involving government departments. What’s really important is the legal specialism, rather than the particular medium or industry.

Q: If you wanted to get involved with social media cases, is prior knowledge important, or should intelligent generalist lawyers be able to pick it up?

A: It always helps to know an industry well, whether that’s newsrooms, or merchant shipping, or construction. But it’s much easier for a specialist lawyer to learn the mores of social media, than for a lawyer who happens to know social media to dabble in a specialism. I spend plenty of time on Twitter, and my practice covers all the torts in ‘media law’, but if a Twitter user was being prosecuted in a criminal court under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, I’d tell them they’re better off going to a criminal barrister who’s never been on Twitter than coming to me. A good lawyer will get their heads around unfamiliar facts quickly – true specialism in law takes much, much longer.

Q: What legal issues do you think social media is going to throw up in the future?

A: In the narrow sense, I’m still waiting for a case on whether Snapchat constitutes a libel or a slander! In the wider sense, there’s a gaping chasm between the EU and Silicon Valley in terms of attitudes towards the protection of personal data, and the scope of immunities afforded to intermediaries (including major social media companies). With the GDPR coming in next May, I’d expect those disputes largely to be litigated by and against the companies that need legal certainty in order to develop their businesses.

[mckinneywrites]

Brexit and “£350 million a week”

You go into a shop. In front of you is a jacket, on sale at £250. The original price was £350. You jump at the bargain. How much lighter are your pockets as a result?

The argument of Boris Johnson, in effect, is that you have just paid £350.

This is obviously inaccurate in the case of the jacket. The inaccuracy in the case of UK financial contributions to the European Union is less obvious, but just as real.

To understand why, consider how this ‘membership fee’ operates. Like all EU member countries, the UK first puts money into a common EU budget. In 2016, UK contributions came to £13.1 billion, or about £250 million a week, according to the Treasury.

It would have been higher if not for the UK rebate, a discount applied during the process of calculating how much we owe each year. Payments without the rebate would have been £327 a week in 2016, and higher still - up around the infamous £350 million a week mark - in previous years.

Some of the money paid in comes back in EU spending. The government received £4.5 billion in EU spending last year. To stretch the jacket analogy to breaking point: when you hand over your £250, you also get £90 or so in store vouchers.

It can quite credibly be argued that the UK lacks “control” over this money, so that the higher figure for initial payments into the budget - the gross rather than the net contribution - should be used in this context.

What cannot be maintained, in light of how this system works, is that “we will take back control of roughly £350m per week”. It is not a sum of money that is ever paid over, because the rebate is deducted at source.

Attesting to that fact are academics, the House of Commons Library, the UK Statistics Authority, the Treasury Select Committee, and the Treasury itself.

As the latter puts it, the rebate “does not involve any transfer of money from the [European] Commission or other member states to the Exchequer”.

It is true that you can find an Office for National Statistics spreadsheet which will list the undiscounted amount as a “debit”. But as a senior ONS official says, “this does not follow how payments are made: HM Treasury pays over the UK’s contributions after deducting the value of the rebate”. The undiscounted figure is notional, theoretical.

Nor does the fact that the rebate is applied a year in arrears make any difference to this analysis. It is still a deduction, not a repayment.

While the amount saved by the rebate fluctuates from year to year, the basic concept behind it has remained the same since 1985. It is entirely under the UK’s “control”, in the sense that we could veto any attempt to remove it.

The government did agree, in 2005, to adjust the rebate calculation so that it yielded a smaller UK discount. Whatever the merits of that decision, it was one taken by the Prime Minister of the day. It was in Mr Blair’s power to retain “control” of the full discount.

So how much would actually be available to spend on the NHS, if redirected from the coffers of Brussels? 

The maximum, as discussed, is £250 million a week, but some of that is already spent in the UK on things like farming subsidies, which would have to be eliminated in order to free up the full amount for other priorities.

More to the point: it doesn’t make particular sense to discuss the membership fee monies in isolation. The Brexit stakes are much higher. As the Treasury Select Committee put it, “if leaving the EU has a substantial positive or negative effect on the economy as a whole… the consequent impact on the public finances is likely to be far more significant than the size of any saving from the EU’s budget contributions”.

In that sense, arguments over the membership fee are a distraction.

[mckinneywrites]

The costs of a “deep and special partnership”

Last week I spoke briefly on Nick Ferrari’s LBC radio show about the Brexit divorce bill, or “financial settlement of United Kingdom obligations”, as the European Commission would have it.

In mugging up for the programme I prepared an example of a plausible post-Brexit cost related to the EU. 

Such future contributions are separate from the divorce bill. The divorce bill is about settling financial commitments the UK has already agreed to (from the EU-27 point of view) or fleecing a big net contributor for everything we’ve got on the way out the door (from the Brexiter point of view). Future contributions are about staying involved with EU programmes or agencies that make sense to be a part of, and paying a fair share of the running costs.

The government wants a “deep and special partnership” with the remaining EU post-Brexit, and there have been indications that the government is willing to pool its resources with those of the EU for certain purposes. Certainly it does not seem to be in anybody’s interests for the UK to leave a blameless agency like that European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, only to recreate its functions without the administrative economies of scale, just because it comes under the EU umbrella.

Now, this may still happen. First, there is the ECJ red line - in principle disputes about EU agencies may end up at the EU court, and the Prime Minister does not want to be subject to decisions of EU judges. Second, there is the Euratom example. The former Vote Leave campaign director, Dominic Cummings, has branded the decision to leave this vital cog in the nuclear machine as “near-retarded”. But it appears to be happening anyway, possibly for the reason already given. Third, there is the EU itself, which cannot be relied upon to meekly accept whatever bespoke plans the UK might deign to accept.

But let us say common sense prevailed on those fronts. A remaining domestic political obstacle might be the cost, given the weight placed on EU membership fees during the referendum campaign and since.

Take, then, the Erasmus student exchange programme. People tend to think it’s a wonderful thing. To my mind, a rational Brexit keeps the UK part of a scheme that sends 15,000 UK undergraduates abroad, and receives 30,000 EU undergraduates here, every year. (Erasmus+, the overall scheme, does much else besides, but the exchange programme is the most well-known aspect.)

Non-EU countries, such as Norway, are part of Erasmus+. They chip in toward the running costs - in 2017, €2.5 billion. Their share is based on the size of their economies. The UK has 14% of the total economy of all the full members of Erasmus+. And 14% of €2.5 billion is €350 million, for just one year.

I don’t pretend that this is precise. I have used Eurostat GDP data for 2015, but the exact formula by which EEA countries like Norway contribute to EU programmes is more complicated. In addition, there is nothing to say that the UK would not negotiate a different formula.

But this is a useful precedent and the number is a plausible ballpark indicator of what the UK might expect to pay to keep the Erasmus programme.

You can also take another example: the Institute for Government roughs out the UK contribution of EU science research funding at €800 million.

My point is that even a single strand of sensible future cooperation with the EU comes at a cost that sounds, to the ordinary voter, extravagant. There may well be a cost in political capital in selling the virtues of such resource-sharing to a Brexit- and austerity-weary electorate. Investing some at an early stage could be worthwhile.

[mckinneywrites]

Tower Hamlets vs The Times

A white, Christian girl has been fostered with a non-white, Muslim family who sought to turn her against her own religion and culture.

So Times readers heard over the past three days (28 - 30 August), with the story about events in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets running on the front page each day. It has also been picked up by the Daily Mail, and doubtless elsewhere.

The East London Family Court has since published a court order made in the case. Many people - particularly on legal Twitter, where I spend a lot of my time - are now pointing to inconsistencies between the facts of the case as stated by the judge in that court order, and the facts as printed by the Times.

What follows is my attempt to reconcile the two accounts and say what we do know about what happened here.

Now, Family Court cases involving children in care are meant to be private. Anyone publishing anything about such cases is well advised to take care in case they reveal any information that they shouldn’t. So I am going to stick very closely to what the court order says, and what the Times and Tower Hamlets have already published, rather than speculate. I regard only the court order as definitive.

I’ll also add this caveat. In family cases, where the people involved are anonymous, lawyers and social workers often refer to “the child”, “the mother” etc. People outside the care system can find this rather dehumanising. I acknowledge that. An alternative is to invent names or initials. I find that even more dehumanising, so will stick to “the child” etc. That is not in any way to forget that we are talking about a five-year-old girl, unique and possessing rights of her own, whose best interests it is the duty of the court and the wider care system to protect and uphold.

Did the foster parents not speak English?

This is a central and important allegation. Naturally a child would be frightened and upset if looked after by strangers who couldn’t even speak to her.

The Times reports that:

“In confidential local authority reports... a social services supervisor describes the child sobbing and begging not to be returned to the foster carer’s home because ‘they don’t speak English’”.

Tower Hamlets, by contrast, says that

“The child is in fact fostered by an English-speaking family of mixed race in this temporary placement. We would like to give more details but we are legally restricted to do so.”

The child has been placed with two foster families. One foster placement began in March 2017, according to the court order. The Times reports that this initial placement lasted four months. There was then a second placement “in the summer to enable the original foster carer to go on holiday” (the court order again).

The Times allegations only appear to relate to the first foster family. There is no allegation that the second foster family could not speak English.

The court order makes no mention of the language abilities of either foster family. It records merely “concerns about the appropriateness of the placement” on the part of the mother (and disputed by Tower Hamlets - the judge says nothing either way). But we can assume from the Times’s own coverage that the first foster family did, in fact, speak English.

First, as family lawyer Sarah Phillimore points out, there are accompanying allegations that the child has been given the ideas that “Christmas and Easter are stupid” and that “European women are stupid and alcoholic”. These are not at all nice ideas. But they can scarcely have been communicated without using the child’s language.

Second, the Times later downgrades the language issue from the child’s reported words that “they don’t speak English” to “the family often did not speak English at home and encouraged her to learn Arabic”.

So what we seem to have here is not a family unable to speak and understand English. It is a family that spoke a different first language from English. Perhaps they did not wish to speak English, for preference. But that is not at all the same thing as being unable to.

The child is, for now, living with her maternal grandmother. This arrangement has the mother’s consent in the short term, although not in the long term. It is significant because the maternal grandmother does not herself speak English as a first language, or perhaps at all. This we know from the judge ordering Tower Hamlets to “translate the mother’s final statement and this order into the language spoken by the maternal grandmother”.

Were the foster placements otherwise appropriate?

The Times is generally critical of, to take one representative comment, “the council’s decision to place a white British child with a family whose culture, faith and primary language were alien”.

This tone has been criticised as “xenophobic”. I am not going there. What I will say is that nobody is really defending these foster placements as ideal, or even appropriate.

Ms Phillimore, in an article so critical of the Times that it risks breaking Godwin’s Law, writes that:

“OF COURSE – if what has happened here is that a little girl is distressed and crying because she is placed with a family who don’t speak English and who make derogatory comments about her own racial and cultural background then this is NOT A GOOD PLACEMENT”.

The Children’s Commissioner is quoted as saying that

“I am concerned at these reports. A child’s religious, racial and cultural background should be taken into consideration when they are placed with foster carers.”

It is true that Sir Martin Narey, who is writing a report on foster care for the government, is quoted by the Telegraph as saying that “skin colour and religion do not matter in 2017”. But he tells me that his full quote continues "so long as the carers are sensitive to the child's cultural, religious or other needs..."

It might be said that all of these reactions are predicated on the assumption that the Times’s account of banning bacon, confiscating crosses and criticism of Western culture is accurate. We don’t know whether it is or not. The court order tells us only that “The allegations made against the foster carers are disputed by the local authority” and that the child’s court-appointed Guardian reports that the second foster placement, at least, is fine. Contrary to what the BBC reports, Judge Khatun Sapnara herself has not pronounced on them.

HHJ Sapnara does note that “there was no culturally matched foster placement available at the time” when the child was first taken into care. There is an assumption here that culturally matched placements are preferred. This is backed up by the Times report of her words in court, addressed to the lawyers representing Tower Hamlets:

“You would presumably accept that the priority should be an appropriate, culturally matched placement that meets the needs of the child in terms of ethnicity, culture and religion?”

The lawyers agreed with that proposition. Unless one assumes that a distinguished reporter on a newspaper like the Times simply invented this exchange, we must assume that all parties are on board with “culturally matched” placements where possible.

So there is plenty of reason to think that, in an ideal world, these are not the foster placements that would have been made.

Was the child removed from foster care because the placement was inappropriate?

No.

The Times reports that:

The five-year-old... was taken to her grandmother’s home after a court ruled that she should not remain in the placement organised by the London borough of Tower Hamlets.

But the court order tells us that the second foster placement was always due to end on 29 August, with a decision on what to do next scheduled for the same date. In advance of that hearing, on 15 August, Tower Hamlets recommended that what should happen next is the child going to live with her grandmother. The council told the media that “We have always been working towards the child being looked after by a family member and we continue to do so”.

Tower Hamlets could not, initially, agree to a family member taking the child because social workers hadn’t yet assessed the grandmother to see whether she could look after the child properly. The child’s Guardian said the same.

The grandmother has since been assessed. The assessment “is positive and recommends her as a suitable carer”. HHJ Sapnara continued:

“For the avoidance of doubt, the Court makes it clear that the decision to approve the new care arrangements for the child to live with the grandmother under an interim care order is as a result of the application of the relevant law to the evidence now available to the court and not as a result of any influence arising out of media reports”.

The child is now living with the grandmother, for the time being.

A curious feature of the case is that the grandmother, according to the court order, may herself be from a Muslim family. Oddly, this fact is in dispute. The court order says on this point:

“Documents including the assessment of the maternal grandparents state that they are of a Muslim background but are non practising. The child’s mother says they are of Christian heritage.”

It is hard to know what to make of this factual dispute and I decline to speculate.

The role played by the Times

It is said that the Times was criticised by HHJ Sapnara, not praised by her as the newspaper claimed.

This is fairly easy to dispose of. The Times writes that

“The judge ordered the council to conduct an urgent investigation into issues reported by The Times, saying that the newspaper had acted responsibly in raising ‘very concerning’ matters of ‘legitimate public interest’”.

The court order does not contain these words. Again, ruling out pure fabrication on the part of the Times, they must have been said in court by the judge (or, just possibly, in direct correspondence with the newspaper). The Times reporter was in the courtroom. It seems safe to assume that the judge what is directly attributed to her - although whether lavishing praise or grudgingly acknowledging the newspaper’s right to report in its own way, we can’t say.

Nor was the court order explicitly critical of the Times, or of anybody, although it does say this:

“The court expresses its concern that photographs of the child and foster carer have been published in the press.”

The Times has run a photograph captioned “the five-year-old girl... with her present foster carer”. The photo does not, and legally could not, identify either one. It is a blurred shot of a lady in Muslim dress alongside a girl with long blonde hair in Western dress, taken from the back.

The lessons?

Whatever else you may think of this story, here are some fairly uncontroversial sentiments.

First, nobody can argue on the basis of the available evidence that the child should never have been removed from the care of her mother in the first place. The court order tells us that:

“There is a complex history and background to this case and the mothers’ [sic] care of the child.

“The child was removed from the mother’s care and placed by social services with foster carers on an emergency basis in March 2017 as a result of the police exercising their powers of protection”.

There are references to the mother being tested for alcohol abuse, and for cocaine use, and to criminal proceedings she is involved in. None of this definitively says that she should not have care of her child; that is for the court to decide. It merely suggests that there is good reason for a court to be involved.

Second, there are not enough foster carers. It is a tough job and reportedly there is a shortfall in the thousands. More foster carers means more culturally appropriate options to choose from.

If you found yourself emotionally involved in this case, stay emotionally involved in pushing for the best possible care system. Put Sir Martin Narey’s report, when it comes out, on your Facebook wall. Donate to a charity. Write to your MP. Do something, however small, that keeps fostering and the care system high on the political agenda.

Third, it is always worth being cautious when you read about a Family Court case like this in the press. Often the account reported is one-sided. The perspective of the parents who have had their child taken into care may be reported; the reasons for that decision - never taken lightly - may not be. The Family Court hears all the evidence, and decides accordingly.

The court is now gathering further evidence ahead of another hearing on 2 October. In the meantime, the child remains with her grandmother - blissfully unaware, one hopes, of the media storm surrounding her case.