Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many appeals against placement orders have been issued in family courts since 2010; and how many of those appeals have been allowed.

HMCTS’ Family Court case management system records contested placement applications and their outcome. Data is available from the system from 2011 only as the functionality to record placement orders went fully live in that year. Data from 2011 to September 2014 is provided in the table below. Data from 2010-11 could only be provided at disproportionate cost due to the need to manually check local case files. The Family Court case management system does not hold information on placement order appeals. It records any appeal applications made within a case but not what the appeal was against or whether it was upheld or rejected. We could only say how many appeals were made against placement orders by manually checking each case file in which a placement order was made to see if it had been appealed and check the outcome. This would incur disproportionate costs.

*Note:

• Functionality to record Adoption and Children Act 2002 proceedings (including placements) was added to the family case management system by December 2010 but the data was not considered to have stabilised until the end of the first quarter in calendar year 2011.
• Order figures are 'case tracked' and therefore not all applications will necessarily have been concluded, especially those made in 2014. This is the reason that there are a higher proportion of unconcluded cases in January-September 2014, compared to previous years: as placement cases can take several months, many of those contested will not yet have concluded.