Cafcass judgment should be challenged in court

What happened

Ms D complained that Cafcass left significant information out of the report it wrote about her children when their father tried to change the terms of the contact and residence order. Ms D said that Cafcass had ignored the way that the father had spoken to the children when they visited him, and this was because Cafcass was biased against her. Ms D said that Cafcass's bias was racially motivated because it also ignored her children's ethnicity in its report. Ms D said that Cafcass was no longer working on the case. However, both she and her children had been emotionally distressed by what had happened, and they now do not trust Cafcass.

What we found

The Cafcass officer had left important information out of her report. She acknowledged that she had done this, and she wrote a letter to the court to tell them about the missing information. We found that it was reasonable for Cafcass to have told Ms D that if she disagreed with any of the Cafcass officer's conclusions, she should have raised this in court. We found that Cafcass sent its response to Ms D's complaint to the court, so that the court would know that she was unhappy about it, and the Cafcass officer was also prepared to be questioned about her report in court. However, this did not happen because the court removed Cafcass from the case.

There were some issues with Cafcass's record keeping, and complaint handling, but those were not significant enough to be maladministration. We did not uphold the complaint.

Putting it right

We made no recommendations in this case. Cafcass's letter to the court had corrected the mistakes in the original report, and its subsequent apology was sufficient for the distress Ms D and her children had suffered.