ABSTRACT
Thus this is an area of law and practice where the CA 1989 has effected major changes: the key sections of the Act are ss 17, 20 and 22-23, together with ss 27 and 47 which require inter-agency cooperation in furtherance of the underlying principle of Part III. One of the fi rst major changes made by the Act was that of introducing the concept of a working partnership of the child’s parents and the local authority in promoting the welfare of the child, instead of (as formerly) the local authority’s simply taking into care every child who is not being properly looked after (and usually resisting the return of that child to its inadequate parents). As a result the local authority is now statutorily compelled by s 17(1) of the Act to safeguard and promote the welfare of children within its area who are in need, and (so far as it is consistent with that general duty) to promote the upbringing of children by their families, by providing a range and level of services appropriate to those children’s needs. It should be noted that the provision of services is discretionary only and will depend on local authority policy and resources. It should also, of course, be noted that these high ideals have not worked to provide the necessary protection and that one reason that has been advanced is that the various responsible agencies which need to contribute to holistic child protection have not managed to work together in a cooperative manner, and as a result the local authority
has not in some cases been able to work satisfactorily with parents, and children have still died unnecessarily, sometimes in terrible circumstances. The Children Act 2004 has sought to address these defi ciencies following the Laming Report, but nevertheless it appears that this has still not been enough to stop the deaths of children even where the
family has been in touch with various social workers. It should be noted that despite the horrifi c aspects of these incidents there is a large number of cases where local authority intervention does achieve good or satisfactory results, 1 so that it would appear that the system is not entirely inherently defi cient and that failures have probably been rightly blamed on human error. Nevertheless,
there remains a diffi cult decision for a local authority to make under the Act: to interfere or not to interfere, including how long to continue to hope to educate and train parents rather than to use the more powerful sections of the Act to remove children from them. 2
‘Family’ is defi ned in s 17(10) as including any person who has parental responsibility for the child and any other person with whom he or she has been living. Services for such families can only be provided with a view to safeguarding or promoting the welfare of a child in need: s 17(3). A ‘child in need’ may be one of three types defi ned in s 17(10):
For the purposes of s 17 a child is disabled if he or she is blind, deaf or dumb, suffers from any kind of mental disorder or is substantially and permanently handicapped by illness, injury or congenital deformity, and s 17(11) goes on to prescribe that ‘development’ includes physical, intellectual, emotional, social or behavioural development and ‘health’ includes both mental and physical health. The general duty in s 17 is fl eshed out by further responsibilities set out in Sched 2 to the Act.
