Child care cases set to be overturned

HUNDREDS of family court cases involving children taken into care on the basis of expert evidence that they were at risk of harm could be overturned, British Children’s Minister Margaret Hodge said yesterday.

However, she gave no hope to parents and their children who might have been wrongly adopted because of flawed testimony, saying that to overthrow such cases could cause distress to adoptive families where youngsters were already “happily settled”. She told MPs her decision to ask local authorities to review their files came after the recent Court of Appeal ruling on the Angela Cannings case.

The mother won an appeal against her conviction for murder of two of her babies after expert evidence from Professor Sir Roy Meadow was discredited.

Solicitor General Harriet Harman then announced that care orders, in which expert evidence was decisive, were to be reviewed under an inquiry that was also examining the convictions of 258 women for murdering their babies over the last decade.

Yesterday, Mrs Hodge told MPs that the number of care order cases under council review was likely to be in the “low hundreds”, rather than thousands.

Shadow attorney general Dominic Grieve said that cases should be re-examined not only where expert witness evidence had been challenged, but also where convictions relied solely on that evidence.

Mr Grieve added that, by limiting the reviews to contested evidence, there was a serious risk that a large number of cases could be overlooked.