ABSTRACT

An historical perspective discloses certain immutable benchmarks for the content of a child’s welfare interests. The most obvious of these are concerned with safeguarding physical integrity. Public law legislation proscribes things, circumstances and behaviour held to be detrimental to welfare and sets the threshold for intervening in family affairs on behalf of any child whose welfare has been impaired. The weighting attached to the child’s welfare interests has threatened to destabilise family law in the UK. The intrinsic relativeness of ‘welfare’ is thrown into sharp relief when the particular needs of the child concerned are not representative of the social context within which they are being measured. The proportion of families in which a breakdown in the relationship between spouses or in standards of parental care brought the question of future care arrangements before the courts was then relatively small.