Twins
The below has been submitted by a local parent:
A Family in crisis. Twins removed from a family in crisis and ordered by the court to be kept together. The twins are seperated against the court order and all professional advice.The adoptive families arent told of the kids backgrounds and reasons. Massive harm and how was no one prosecuted?
BT & GT (Children : twins - adoption) [2018] EWFC 76 (29 November 2018)
Below is the highlights from the judgement. Court statements copied and pasted in bold font.
Item 24. The local authority then and now records all information about a child on a system called Mosaic. This system created a form of the care plan but not in the format or detail of the care plan approved by the court. The care plan ought to have been uploaded onto the system in the documents. No one, however, was able to persuade me that this uploading of the court care plan of 19th March 2015 in fact occurred.
Mosiac is as corrupt as the people loading it. Im assured the password for a considerable time was 'password' and the admin code to access the locked files was on post-it notes around the offices. Council withheld from the court or the court never asked if Mosaic has a key stroke memory. And it does.
Item 47. part II a failure to disclose in full detail the needs of, the challenging behaviours of and the past life experiences of BT or GT to their prospective adopters;
part III a member of the social work team deleting references to the children’s challenging violent behaviours from the Child Permanence Reports (‘CPR’) and the Adoption Support Plans;
The open admission that Mosiac was being unlawfully 'edited' should be cause for prosecutions. The ‘locked’ files had been corrupted.
Item 48 part x the failure in applying full and accurate information in the CPRs and Adoption Support Plans including the adoption team manager wrongly and inappropriately deleting information about the twins challenging behaviours;
part xIII the failure of the local authority, as a result of poor record keeping, to provide accurate evidence to the court.
Item 49 On the second day of the final hearing the local authority discovered there were documents and records, which contrary to previous orders and/or the local authority's general duty of disclosure, had not been disclosed to the court or to the parties. When the disclosure was made it amounted to some 200 pages. I gave the parties the whole of the following day to read and digest the documents disclosed and to take instructions.
Gossip, legend is the SWs held evening zoom meets to decide what to disclose. One night they realise they have too much documentation to plausibly deny they forgot about or got lost. The SWs also saw the case was going badly. The SWs bottled it and info dumped. Also hope was detail would get lost in the mass of data... it didnt. Herefordshire is really small place socially. That’s the unevidenced story... but it sounds right.
Item 52 It then emerged that the then social worker, D, the author of the sibling assessment had misquoted the opinions of Dr Mair Edwards, a consultant psychologist, who had prepared a report on the children for the purposes of the original care proceedings. The extract contained in the sibling assessment of July 2016 reads as follows
“Dr Edwards concluded, “If GT and BT were not twins, I would be recommending separate placements for them as GT’s challenging and bossy behaviours do impact on BT’s abilities to express himself and he therefore tends to focus in on his love of mechanical objects and machinery, and withdraws from social interactions…Both GT and BT have significant learning difficulties and developmental delay and will have significant needs throughout their childhoods. Their long-term placement would therefore need to be fully aware of the high level of commitment that will be required, and the ongoing support that the children are likely to require from agencies and services throughout their lives””
It will be noted three dots appear about halfway down the extract indicating some material had been omitted. Counsel for the children’s guardian, Mr Kingerley referred me to Dr Mair Edwards 2014 report. The passage omitted from the above extract reads as follows:
“When observing them together there was very limited interaction (other than GT telling BT to “no talk”), and no real sense of a sibling relationship. However, they are twins, and the sense of loss in later years at being separated would almost certainly be more detrimental to their welfare than placing them together.”
Item 53. The words omitted completely change the import and meaning of the quoted section of Dr Mair Edwards’ report. The social worker was not called to give evidence before me nor has she been given the opportunity to give an explanation. Therefore, I will not name her in this judgment. The prospects of this being an innocent omission are unlikely in the extreme. It is not an opening or concluding sentence that has been missed. It is a passage in the middle of the quoted passage from the report and the deliberate omission of some words was marked by three dots. Given also that the omitted section of Dr Mair Edwards’ report sets out an opinion wholly contrary to the ultimate recommendation of the sibling assessment, the only credible explanation for this omission is a deliberate act to mislead a reader of the assessment to conclude that the recommendation of separate placements for adoption was consistent with the opinion of Dr Mair Edwards. It manifestly was not.
Item 54. I was informed by counsel for the children’s guardian that in another case, some years ago, the self-same social worker was alleged to have tampered with a document. I asked for the issue of the social worker’s role in drafting the sibling assessment to be referred to the Director of Children’s Services and to the Chief Executive of Herefordshire Council. The social worker had left the local authority in March 2018 but had later been re-engaged in some role on a zero hours contract. It was proposed, in the Adoption Support Plans, that this social worker would be carrying out life story work for the twins. The following day I was told by counsel for the local authority that her contract had been terminated with immediate effect.
Im told the offending SW was on maternity leave.
Item 57, The catalogue of the local authority's errors and failings in this case is troubling and hugely lamentable. I do not minimise any of the admitted breaches of human rights and/or the other admitted failures by highlighting what I consider to be the most egregious failures, namely:
i) the deletion of important and highly relevant information from the CPRs and Adoption Support Plans by the adoption team manager. This could only have been done to mislead the prospective adopters about BT and GT's respective behaviours and needs with a view to increasing the prospects of them agreeing to a placement of BT or GT with them;
ii) the deliberate and misleading selective quote from the report of Dr Mair Edwards in the so-called 'sibling assessment'. I am satisfied that the social worker began this apparent assessment with the end result, that of separating the twins, already decided and wrote an assessment to support that conclusion. I do not understand why this assessment was written up three months after the decision had been taken on 10th April 2016 to place the twins separately for adoption or why this decision was not stayed pending the completion of a sibling assessment;
iii) the failure to give full and frank information about the twins to their prospective adopters and their respective supporting adoption agencies;
iv) the complete and utter failure of the IRO service to satisfy any of its statutory duties in respect of BT and GT. The IROs and the IRO service did absolutely nothing to protect and promote the welfare best interests of the children and did nothing to challenge the local authority's dreadful and, at times, irrational decision making and care planning; and
v) the failure for there to be any note or record of the matters considered, the documents read or the reasons for taking the life changing decision to place the twins separately for adoption taken on 10th April 2016. It is astonishing given the highly unusual and momentous nature of the decisions
71. Ms Elgar could not explain how or why the material which had been disclosed at this hearing had not been disclosed at an earlier time or had been ‘lost’ by the local authority. She recognised the local authority’s serious shortcomings and sought to assure the court that action had been, and would continue to be, taken to resolve the identified and admitted failings of the local authority. She accepted the deletions from the CPRs and Adoption Support Plans resulted from a deliberate and wrongful act by an employee of the local authority.
I find the case proven. Prosecute them all. Fair comment. Its unlikely the whole child social services staff didnt know or even have a part in this appalling unlawful misadventure.
So perjury, fraud by false instrument, contempt, malfeasance/nonfeasance/misconduct in public office, contempt, coercion, contempt again, and how much did this all cost the council? and have any council employees lost a days wage or a nights sleep? I doubt it.