G-H (Children) , Re

This is Mr Goulding’s application for permission to appeal the order of Her Honour Judge Butler QC sitting in the Nottingham County Court on 29 May 2012.

Mr Goulding’s chances of achieving permission are not helped by the fact that his Appellant’s Notice was not filed until 30 January 2013. He has been represented at this hearing by Ms Haines, his McKenzie Friend, and I have permitted her to speak on his behalf as though his advocate. She is handicapped in making the case because she really knows very little of what transpired in the court below. She has produced a note of an advocates’ meeting on 8 May which records an anticipated two-day hearing sometime in June. In the event the hearing took place on 29 May. Mr Goulding says it only lasted an hour. Dr Banks did not give evidence, and I can only assume that there was some sort of general acknowledgement that the case was going short. Certainly there is no question of Mr Goulding having agreed, because in paragraph 4 of her judgment the judge records that Mr Goulding objected to the making of care and placement orders in respect of Bethany and Destiny, two of the children with whom the judge was concerned, and his application to this court relates only to those two children. But the fact that Dr Banks was not there and the fact that the hearing apparently only lasted a day and was within that very month of May all suggests to me that there must have been some sort of undertone that the case was not any longer being vigorously contested.

The judgment, although only running to eight pages, is reasonably clear, and perhaps its brevity is another pointer to some reduction in the judge’s task, but in essential the judge explains, having recorded the history and substantial concessions made by Mr Goulding, that the children have special needs and that the view of both Dr Banks and the guardian was that Mr Goulding could not meet those needs, and so in paragraph 22 the judge expressed her conclusion that all the evidence, and all the professional advice, compelled her to make the order sought.

It is also suggested that perhaps some professional conduct investigation had been commenced and was pending into Dr Banks’s professional standards. That is quite a serious attack on an expert and would require to be clearly substantiated. But there is nothing but the suggestion that one of the other counsel in the case referred to a pending investigation arising out of another case in another county. So although I understand Mr Goulding’s commitment to these two girls, which he has expressed by going to Ms Haines and then coming here himself today with Ms Haines, there is really no possible basis upon which I could grant permission, and were I to do so I would only be setting up a further hearing which would involve an expenditure of resources at both a local and a central level which would not be justified on the material before me.

So the application is refused.