Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service wrongly used information then failed to spot this when challenged

What happened

Mr G was in a dispute with his ex-partner about contact with his children. A county court heard the case and asked Cafcass for more information to help with its decision. Cafcass produced a report that contained information from the Police National Computer about an alleged assault. Cafcass's report correctly showed that the police had taken no further action on the allegation. However, the report gave incorrect information about the type of assault that had been committed.

Mr G's solicitor wrote to Cafcass three times asking it to clarify where the information had come from. The solicitor also explained that evidence obtained from the police did not agree with the statement in the report. Cafcass failed to respond to the solicitor, and it was five months before Cafcass realised the handwritten entry had been copied incorrectly. Cafcass then took steps to clarify the information in the report with the court.

Mr G complained to Cafcass that he had incurred unnecessary legal costs because of its failing. Cafcass initially offered to pay Mr G the £10 he had paid to obtain evidence from the police. Mr G was unhappy with this outcome and asked his MP to refer the complaint to us.

When we proposed to investigate the complaint, Cafcass noted that Mr G had paid legal costs for his solicitor to write letters of complaint about the inaccurate information. Cafcass offered to reimburse these costs and we put this offer to Mr G. He declined the offer and said he had been caused further costs as a result of Cafcass's failing, so we decided to go ahead with an investigation.

What we found

We did not uphold this complaint. Cafcass had wrongly copied the handwritten note, but we concluded that the impact of this failing was not as great as Mr G claimed. We agreed with Cafcass that it should reimburse the costs Mr G had paid for his solicitor to complain about the entry, but we did not find that Cafcass's error was linked to any other legal costs that Mr G had paid. We did not uphold the complaint because Cafcass had already offered to do enough to put matters right for Mr G. Cafcass also confirmed that it no longer relied on handwritten transcripts from the Police National Computer, so we were satisfied a similar incident would not happen again.

Putting it right

Cafcass had already offered to do enough to put matters right for Mr G, so we did not make any further recommendations.