Family law guide
By Iblal Iqbal
Part of: Section 47 Report Explained: What Happens During Section 47 Enquiries?
An interim care order hands the local authority parental responsibility for your child, shared with you, while the court works out what should happen (Children Act 1989, s.38). A much lower test applies than for a final order. The court only needs reasonable grounds for believing your child is suffering, or is likely to suffer, significant harm. Nobody has proved anything at that point, and nothing about the case is decided. Parliament also scrapped the old eight-week expiry in April 2014. Our family law specialists assist and advise at every stage. This page covers the law of England and Wales only.
Reviewed by: Garry Steedman, Family Law Consultant (Divorce, Children & TOLATA), Kabir Family Law
A care order is an order of the family court placing a child in the care of a named local authority. An interim care order does the same job temporarily. It holds the position while the court gathers evidence and decides. Both come from section 31 of the Children Act 1989. Only a local authority, or an authorised person, may apply for one. No parent applies for a care order, and nobody can force a parent to agree to one.
So what is a care order doing in practice? It moves real decision-making power. Section 31(1) lets the court place your child in the care of a designated local authority, or instead put your child under that authority’s supervision. Those two orders are the only ones on the table in child care proceedings. They sit very far apart in what they do to a family.
This point catches parents out constantly. A court can make a care order while your child stays living with you, under an agreed plan. Equally, a child can live elsewhere with no order at all, where the parents have agreed to it under section 20 of the Children Act 1989. Where your child lives, and which order is in force, are two separate questions. Muddling them costs parents ground they never needed to lose.
It gives the local authority parental responsibility for your child. It also gives that authority the power to decide how much of yours you may still use. That is the blunt answer. Section 33(3) says the authority shall have parental responsibility, and shall have the power to determine the extent to which a parent may meet theirs.
Those limits matter, so read them twice. Section 33(4) lets the authority use that power only where it is satisfied doing so protects your child’s welfare. Section 33(5) keeps your parental responsibility with you, and lets you still do what is reasonable to safeguard your child. Nobody writes you out. You are sharing, on terms you did not choose.
Some things the local authority simply cannot do, whatever the care plan says. It cannot change your child’s religion. Adoption is not its decision either, to agree to or to refuse. Nor can it appoint a guardian. Section 33(6) puts all three beyond reach. Under section 33(7), nobody may give your child a new surname or take them out of the United Kingdom without the written consent of every person with parental responsibility, or the court’s leave. Section 33(8) makes an exception for removals of under a month.
A holding order while the court decides. It rests on reasonable grounds, not on findings.
The final order. The court makes it only once satisfied the threshold really applies.
Help and oversight, with no transfer of power. Often the order a parent works towards.
Parents ask about contact first, and the law here helps more than people expect. Where your child is in the care of a local authority, that authority must allow your child reasonable contact with you (section 34(1)). It can refuse contact on its own initiative only in a genuine emergency, and then for no more than seven days (section 34(6)). Anything longer needs a court order under section 34(4). Has contact stopped without anyone explaining which of those applies? Ask today, not next month.
In care proceedings it lasts until the court disposes of the application. No eight-week expiry survives. Section 38(4)(c) of the Children Act 1989 ties the order to the disposal of the case. Section 14(4) of the Children and Families Act 2014 deleted the old limits, eight weeks for a first interim order and four for later ones, with effect from 22 April 2014.
Plenty of material online still quotes those eight weeks, so precision pays here. One situation does keep them. Where an interim order follows a direction to the local authority to investigate in other family proceedings, under section 37, section 38(4)(da) still caps the order at eight weeks from the day the court makes it.
That change did not make interim orders open-ended. It moved the clock. Section 32(1)(a)(ii) requires the court to dispose of a care or supervision application without delay, and in any event within 26 weeks beginning with the day of issue. The court may extend that period under section 32(5), but only by eight weeks at a time. Section 32(7) tells it not to grant extensions routinely. So the honest answer runs like this: as long as the case takes, inside a 26-week frame the court has a duty to hold.
One further power belongs here, because it occasionally keeps a child at home. Section 38A lets the court attach an exclusion requirement to an interim care order. That removes one adult from the house rather than the child. Somebody else there must be able to give the child reasonable care, and must consent to it. Courts use this far less often than they could, and almost nobody offers it to a parent who does not ask.
A supervision order puts your child under the supervision of a local authority, and gives that authority no parental responsibility. That single difference is the whole point of it. You go on making the decisions about your child. The local authority allocates a supervisor, and section 35(1) gives that person three duties: to advise, assist and befriend the supervised child, to take the steps reasonably necessary to give effect to the order, and to consider applying to vary or discharge it.
So what is a supervision order in day-to-day terms? Visits, a written plan, and requirements the order can attach to your child under Part I of Schedule 3. The order can also place requirements on a responsible person, meaning you, or anyone with parental responsibility who lives with your child. Schedule 3, paragraph 3 allows that only with that person’s consent. Nobody can slip obligations onto you behind your back.
A supervision order also has a much shorter life. Schedule 3, paragraph 6 gives it one year. The supervisor can apply to extend it, but paragraph 6(4) stops it running beyond three years from the day the court made it. Compare a full care order, which under section 91(12) lasts until your child turns eighteen unless something ends it sooner. That contrast explains why so much work in care proceedings comes down to one argument: which of the two orders does the evidence actually justify?
Section 31(2) sets out two things the local authority must satisfy the court about. First, that your child is suffering, or is likely to suffer, significant harm. Second, that the harm is attributable either to the care given, or likely to be given, falling short of what a parent could reasonably be expected to give, or to your child being beyond parental control. Both limbs, not one. Miss either and no order follows.
The threshold criteria do not ask a general question about whether you are a good parent. They ask for a specific comparison. Under section 31(10), where the question turns on whether harm is significant, the court compares your child’s health or development with what it could reasonably expect of a similar child. Section 31(9) then defines the working words. Harm means ill-treatment, or the impairment of health or development, and that expressly covers impairment a child suffers from seeing or hearing the ill-treatment of somebody else.
Two limits deserve a note. The court cannot make a care order or a supervision order once a child has turned seventeen, or sixteen where the child is married (section 31(3)). For an interim order the test drops deliberately: reasonable grounds for believing those circumstances exist, rather than proof of them (section 38(2)). Treat the interim hearing as the moment you lost the case and you have misread it. Treat it as unimportant and you have misread it the other way.
Most evidence the court reads at that stage comes from work the local authority did before it applied. Our guides to the section 47 enquiry, the child protection conference and the pre-proceedings letter explain how that material gets built, and the public law outline timetable the court then applies to it.
Statute and the court’s own timetable fix the sequence below. These are the dates the court works to. Knowing them is the difference between reacting to letters and being ready for them.
| Stage | When | What the court decides | What it means for you |
|---|---|---|---|
| Application issued | Day 1 to day 2 | The local authority files its application, its social work statement and chronology, and its care plan. The court allocates the case. | The 26-week clock starts on the day of issue. |
| First hearing | Usually within days of issue | Whether to make an interim care or supervision order, and where your child lives meanwhile. | The court decides on reasonable grounds, not findings. It hears your position here. |
| Case management hearing | Not before day 12, not later than day 18 | The issues, the evidence, any expert assessment, and the timetable to the final hearing. | The most influential hearing of the case. Anything nobody seeks here is hard to add later. |
| Assessments and evidence | Weeks 3 to 20 | Parenting assessments, anything the court directs under section 38(6), and family members you put forward as carers. | Your chance to be assessed at your best, and to name relatives early. |
| Issues resolution hearing | As the court directs, usually weeks 20 to 25 | What everyone agrees, and what still has to be tried. Many cases finish here. | A realistic settlement, or a defined fight, rather than both. |
| Final hearing | Within 26 weeks of issue | Whether the threshold applies, and if so which order, if any, your child’s welfare requires. | The interim order ends here, and the final decision takes over. |
| Extension | Up to 8 weeks at a time | Only where an extension is necessary to resolve the case justly, and never as a routine step. | Whoever wants delay has to justify it to the court. |
Not at the final hearing. The leverage sits at the case management hearing in the first fortnight, where the court orders the assessments and frames the issues. Arrive there with a relative already willing to be assessed, and a clear account of what has changed, and you are running a different case from the parent who arrives to listen.
Pick where things have got to, and where your child is sleeping tonight. The panels then set out what usually happens next, and what is still yours to decide.
Those turn on your papers and your dates. They are far cheaper to get right before the case management hearing than after it.
Book a free initial consultation
One of our specialists will give you initial advice on your situation.
A full care order is the final order, and it rearranges the legal furniture around your child. Under section 91(12) it lasts until your child turns eighteen unless something ends it sooner. Making it also discharges any existing section 8 order, which includes a child arrangements order (section 91(2)). It discharges any supervision order already running too (section 91(3)).
It does not end your relationship with your child in law, and it does not end your standing in the case. You keep parental responsibility. The authority must allow reasonable contact. It must also work to the care plan it filed, because section 31A requires the local authority to prepare a care plan for your child’s future care, keep it under review while the application is pending, and revise it where something changes. You are entitled to read that plan properly, and to argue about it.
Care orders are less permanent than the word suggests. You can apply to discharge one, and our guide to discharging a care order sets out who may apply and what has to have changed. Where the plan is adoption instead, the route runs through a placement order, which is a different application with a different test. Anyone telling you those two things are the same is wrong.
A timetable only helps once your own dates sit inside it. Take an application issued on 5 January as a worked example. Every date below is arithmetic on the provisions already cited, so you can redo it with your own issue date in about two minutes.
Put your own issue date through those five lines and two things jump out. The window that decides what evidence the court will ever see closes inside three weeks. The window for putting a relative forward closes months before anyone stands up at a final hearing.
Most of the damage happens in the first three weeks, before anyone takes advice. These are the patterns we see again and again.
Our specialists assist and advise from the moment the local authority’s concerns turn into an application, or before that, if you still have time. They read the social work statement and the chronology against the threshold in section 31(2), and tell you which parts amount to evidence and which are assertion. They explain what the care plan commits everyone to, and what a realistic alternative order would look like on your facts.
Then comes the practical work. Which assessments to ask for, and when. Which relatives to put forward. What to say about contact, and how to use the case management hearing rather than sit through it. Where the concerns began with a section 47 enquiry, we start there, because how those enquiries were carried out often matters as much as what they found. Where a family assistance order or a supervision order could answer the concern, we say so and we argue it.
A free initial consultation is a conversation with a specialist, who gives you initial advice on your circumstances. It does not include drafting or reviewing documents. Before the call, have three things to hand: the date the application was issued or the letter arrived, your next hearing date, and the names of any relatives who might be able to help.
It is an order of the family court placing your child in the care of a named local authority. That authority then holds parental responsibility for your child, and can decide how much of yours you may use. It can do that only where the decision protects your child’s welfare. You keep your parental responsibility, and the authority must allow your child reasonable contact with you. Only a local authority, or an authorised person, can apply for one.
In care proceedings it lasts until the court disposes of the application. Section 14(4) of the Children and Families Act 2014 removed the old eight-week limit on a first interim order, and the four-week limit on later ones, on 22 April 2014. The eight weeks survives in one situation only: where the interim order follows a direction to the local authority to investigate in other family proceedings under section 37. Meanwhile the whole case has to finish within 26 weeks of issue.
Not automatically. The order gives the local authority parental responsibility, but the care plan sets out where your child lives, and that is a separate decision. A child can stay at home under a care order. The court can also attach an exclusion requirement under section 38A, removing an adult from the home rather than the child, where somebody else in the household can give reasonable care and consents to it. You can argue what the plan proposes, and the hearing is where you argue it.
A supervision order puts your child under the supervision of a local authority and gives that authority no parental responsibility. The supervisor must advise, assist and befriend your child. For a parent it is a much lighter order: you keep the decisions, requirements on you need your consent, and it lasts one year and cannot run beyond three years from the day the court made it. In many cases the real argument is not whether the threshold applies, but whether a supervision order would be enough.
Section 31(2) of the Children Act 1989 requires two things. First, that the child is suffering, or is likely to suffer, significant harm. Second, that the harm is attributable to the care given, or likely to be given, falling short of what a parent could reasonably be expected to give, or to the child being beyond parental control. Where the question is whether harm is significant, the court compares the child’s health or development with what it could reasonably expect of a similar child. For an interim order the court needs only reasonable grounds for believing those circumstances exist.
Yes. Section 33(5) confirms that a parent who holds parental responsibility keeps it, and may still do what is reasonable to safeguard the child. What changes is that the local authority holds parental responsibility too, and may determine the extent to which you meet yours, under section 33(3). Some things it cannot do at all. It cannot change your child’s religion, agree to an adoption, appoint a guardian, or allow a change of surname or removal from the United Kingdom without the written consent of everyone with parental responsibility, or the court’s leave.
You can challenge it. Where a child is in the care of a local authority, section 34(1) requires that authority to allow the child reasonable contact with their parents. It can refuse contact on its own initiative only where that is urgently necessary to protect the child’s welfare, and such a refusal cannot last more than seven days. Anything longer requires a court order under section 34(4), and you are entitled to be heard on it. Get the proposed contact level, and the reasons for any reduction, in writing.
Yes. A care order lasts until the child turns eighteen unless something ends it sooner, and you can apply to discharge it. The court looks for a genuine change in the circumstances that led to the order, and it wants evidence rather than assertion. A care order also ends on adoption, or where the court makes a special guardianship order. Our guide to discharging a care order sets out who may apply and what the application involves.
Often, yes, and it is one of the first things to raise. The local authority can assess a relative as a carer during the proceedings, and the court will want to know about family options before it approves a plan outside the family. A special guardianship order is the usual route to give a relative lasting authority. It needs three months’ written notice to the local authority first, and the court cannot proceed without the local authority’s report. Raise relatives early, because the 26-week timetable is unforgiving about it.
Not before you understand what agreeing commits you to. Agreement to a plan, to accommodation, or to a written safety agreement all become part of the evidence, and unpicking them is hard. Refusing everything on principle rarely helps a parent either, because the court looks at engagement. The useful question is narrower. What would have to be true for the least intrusive order to be enough, and will anyone put that in writing? Take advice on that rather than answering it alone.
If court papers have landed, the case management hearing falls between day 12 and day 18. That is where the court decides the assessments, the experts and the timetable. It is also where you can still put a relative forward, and still argue for a different order. Parents who walk in prepared run a different case from parents who walk in to listen. Book a free initial consultation, and one of our specialists will give you initial advice on where you stand and what to ask for.
Book a free initial consultation or call 0330 094 5880
You can also read our guide to the section 47 enquiry that usually comes first.
General information about the law in England and Wales, not advice on your circumstances.
Parents put enormous weight on the first hearing and almost none on the one a fortnight later. That is the wrong way round. A first hearing is a holding decision on a low test. The case management hearing is where the court orders the assessments, names the experts and fixes the timetable, and cases very often turn on what nobody asked for that morning. So on the day the papers arrive, ask two questions before any others. Who should be assessed? And which relative do I want assessed alongside me? Answer those in writing, early, and the rest of the twenty-six weeks becomes a case you are running rather than a case that is running you.
Iblal Iqbal, Partner & Family Law Strategist
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