Re B-A: Court of Appeal upholds section 26 contact order for vulnerable father following placement for adoption

The Court of Appeal has dismissed a local authority's challenge to a section 26 contact order requiring face-to-face contact between two young children and their birth father following their placement for adoption. In Re B-A (Placement Order and Contact Order) [2026] EWCA Civ 356, Lord Justice Cobb, with whom Lady Justice Falk and Lord Justice Phillips agreed, held that HHJ Lazarus had been entitled to make the order and had committed no identifiable error of law or reasoning.

The proceedings concerned four siblings. Care and placement orders were made in relation to the two youngest boys, C (aged 4) and D (aged 3), with adoption identified as the plan best serving their welfare. Their father — aged 62, illiterate, and assessed as functioning in the extremely low range of adult intellectual ability — had maintained a warm, positive and committed relationship with both boys throughout. The Judge described him as "extremely good-hearted" and noted that C and D "know and love him dearly."

The local authority did not dispute the value of the father's relationship with the children, nor did it oppose future direct contact in principle. Its objection was to the form of the court's intervention. It argued that a section 26 order, rather than a non-binding recital recording intentions to support contact, would likely halve the pool of prospective adopters — a concern the family finding social worker had expressed in both oral evidence and written answers to the court. The Guardian supported this position, recommending a sibling contact order but opposing any parental contact order.

HHJ Lazarus rejected that approach. She accepted the professional consensus on the welfare benefits of adoption and on sibling contact, but departed from the Guardian and social worker on the question of the appropriate order for parental contact. Her reasoning turned on two connected findings: first, that ongoing direct contact with their father was an "established need" for C and D rather than merely a desirable outcome; and second, that without a court order, the father's significant cognitive vulnerabilities would render any informal arrangement effectively unenforceable. A man who cannot read or write, and who required intermediary support throughout the proceedings, could not realistically be expected to navigate the administrative and legal demands of seeking to enforce contact absent a formal order. Indirect contact, she concluded, would be "an extremely poor, inadequate and unlikely mitigation."

On appeal, the local authority advanced four grounds: inadequate welfare analysis; failure to give proper weight to the family finding evidence; misapplication of the no-order principle under section 1(6) of the Adoption and Children Act 2002; and failure to give adequate reasons for departing from the professional recommendations.

Lord Justice Cobb dismissed all four. On the family finding evidence, the Court of Appeal noted an important ambiguity: it was not clear whether the reduction in the adopter pool would follow from the making of a section 26 order specifically, or equally from any explicit commitment by the local authority to support direct contact — a commitment which would necessarily have to be disclosed to prospective adopters in any event. On the no-order principle, Cobb LJ held that the Judge had plainly concluded that compulsion was "better" for the children than reliance on an informal arrangement, given the father's documented vulnerabilities. On Ground 4, whilst acknowledging it might have been "courteous" to explain the departure from professional opinion more explicitly, the failure to do so did not vitiate the decision.

The judgement reaffirms the principles in Re R and C [2024] EWCA Civ 1302 and Re S [2025] EWCA Civ 823: the court, not the local authority, bears responsibility for setting the template for contact at the placement order stage. Where ongoing contact is found to be necessary rather than merely desirable, a section 26 order should be made even if doing so makes family finding more challenging.

Cobb LJ also noted the underutilised safety net of section 27(1) of the 2002 Act, which permits variation or revocation of a section 26 order on application. He suggested that judges making such orders might usefully reserve any section 27 application to themselves and remind parties of the court's case management powers under the Family Procedure Rules 2010 to ensure swift resolution.

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