ABSTRACT
The law has a significant part to play in child protection and the provisions of the Children Act 1989 have been described by Lord Mackay as 'the most comprehensive and far reaching reform of child law which has come before Parliament in living memory'. By the 1980s the need for root and branch reform of both the substance of child care law, and the court structure within which it was administered, was only too apparent to social work and legal practitioners trying to make sense of complex and confusing provisions. The chapter considers the issues that informed the content of the new provisions in which both public and professional opinion played their part. The daunting legal disadvantage of parents when trying to challenge local authorities' decisions resulted in some of those children being quite literally 'lost in care' and the voices of the children being too often ignored when they should have been listened to.
