Re T and F (Placement Orders: Child's Permanence Reports): Court of Appeal dismisses appeal despite serious procedural irregularity

A local authority's failure to serve child's permanence reports on parents, in breach of case management directions made on three separate occasions, was a serious procedural irregularity but did not render the resulting placement orders unjust, the Court of Appeal has held.

In T and F (Placement Orders: Child's Permanence Reports) [2026] EWCA Civ 902, handed down on 16 July 2026, Lord Justice Baker gave the lead judgement, with Lady Justice Falk and Lord Justice Miles agreeing. The court had announced at the conclusion of the hearing on 2 July that the linked appeals would be dismissed, with reasons to follow.

The proceedings concerned two children, aged rising four and just two, removed from their mother's care in August 2025 after her mental health deteriorated and she disclosed cocaine and alcohol use contrary to an agreement with the local authority. Threshold was asserted on the basis of exposure to domestic abuse inflicted by the father, substance misuse by both parents, and the mother's mental health difficulties. Parenting assessments of both parents and alternative carer assessments of friends and extended family all reached negative conclusions. HH Judge Magee made care and placement orders at Portsmouth in December 2025.

Reports running to 79 and 77 pages were prepared on the Coram BAAF standard form and submitted to the adoption agency decision maker. They were uploaded to a confidential file on the public law portal, accessible to the court but not to the parents' representatives, and were never served, despite directions to that effect made in June, September and October 2025. Neither set of solicitors requested the reports or raised the omission with the judge.

Permission to appeal was granted out of time on a single ground. Sarah Phillimore, instructed by Alletsons for the mother, argued that depriving a party of the opportunity to scrutinise the report raises immediate and serious concern about procedural irregularity even where other evidence supports the order, and that any assertion the court would have decided the same way in any event undermines the seriousness of the failure. The father, acting in person, filed a skeleton contending that the omission had severely compromised his lawyers' ability to present his case, but did not attend the remote hearing.

Baker LJ accepted the irregularity was serious, noting that the failure was compounded by non-compliance with a direction made no fewer than three times, and that the representatives' failure to notice did not excuse or cancel out the error. Citing Sir Ernest Ryder's observations in Re S-F (A Child) that it is poor practice not to file such reports, given that they record in original form the pros and cons of each realistic option and the reasoning behind the application, he nonetheless held the decisive question to be whether the decision was thereby unjust under CPR rule 52.21(3).

It was not. Ms Phillimore was unable to identify any material information in the reports that did not also appear in the statements and other documents in the bundle. Unlike in Re S-F, the evidence before the judge was not limited. Applying the two-stage test from Re S (Vulnerable Party: Fairness of Proceedings), the court rejected the submission that the life-changing significance of adoption automatically renders such a failure fatal.

Baker LJ was careful to record that he was not condoning the error, observing that in different circumstances it could have succeeded and caused further delay. The standard template provision requiring service, while excluding the reports from the bundle absent request, must be followed where incorporated into an order.

He added, obiter, that leaving the form's Appendix blank was a mistake. Its purpose includes recording parents' views in their own words, and an adult child reading the report years later may be particularly interested in what their birth parents said at the time.

Anthony Hand appeared for the local authority; Corinne Iten, instructed by Dutton Gregory, for the children by their guardian.