Northern Ireland

Abstract

ings that the children’s welfare was best served by them remaining in K’s care but subject to care orders. There does not seem to have been any doubt that K could not be approved as a foster carer (it was not one of those cases where the court could ask the local authority to support the carer to allow them to be approved) and so the local authority could only lawfully make a placement with him under the ‘Placement with P’ chapter (Part 4, Chapter 1) of the Care Planning, Placement and Case Review (England) Regulations 2010. P is defined as (a) a parent, (b) someone with parental responsibility or (c) a person named as someone with whom the child is to live in a child arrangements order, in force immediately before the making of the care order. In the circumstances of this case there was no other way of K acquiring PR. He was not the children’s biological or legal father and was no longer their stepfather, having been divorced from their mother. It might have been possible to make a child arrangements order within the proceedings to allow K to fall within the definition of ‘P’. However, this might have been even more convoluted than the making of an SGO immediately followed by a care order to allow the SGO to be treated as preexisting; and the parental responsibility this acquired would not have survived the making of the care order. There has been significant discussion about the making of SGOs combined with supervision orders, with a logical difficulty in most cases of granting the carer overriding parental responsibility but at the same time requiring the local authority to supervise the child’s welfare. The President’s Guidance (2020) suggests that the combination of those orders should be a ‘red flag’, suggesting a lack of confidence in the SGO and that there will only be a very small number of cases where an SGO and supervision order together will be appropriate. There has been no similar discussion about the making of a care order and SGO at the same time because it does not seem to have been considered as an option before (or at least not in reported cases). It may be time to start that discussion.