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'Change of residency'.
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Janeja
[FOI #3904 email]
Cafcass
6th Floor Sanctuary Buildings
Great Smith Street
London
SW1P 3BT
Tel: 0844 353 3317
Fax 0844 353 3398
Your ref: CAF183
Our ref: JJ/CAF183
Date: 10th December 2008
Dear Janeja
Re: Freedom of Information Request
Thank you for your recent request, which was passed onto me, requesting the following:
Please could you advise, how many children across the country have in the past 5 years been removed from the care of their resident parent and residency given to the non-resident parent due to Cafcass suggesting that resident parent is either hostile to contact and/or not promoting contact. Could you please indicate how many of such cases involved the resident parent not giving contact at all, how many cases are such that where contact is given the children are not settled and distressed. Could you also indicate in how many of these cases did the resident parent raise issues of domestic abuse and/or child abuse.
Please also indicate, how many of the cases where residency is moved that the resident parent raised a complaint about the Cafcass officer. Please show where a FCA is involved and where a Guardian Ad Litem is involved.
The format that I'd envisaged to be easiest would be: No of cases where residency was shifted to non-resident parent, breaking it by region of Cafcass/contact given/children distressed and not settled/domestic abuse/abuse of children/FCA or Guardian/year decision made.
Your reference number is CAF 183.
Unfortunately it has not been possible to provide you with the information you have requested. The reasons are set out below:
We can only obtain this information from our Case Management System, which has been in place as a national system since April 2007, so we could not go beyond this date.
Information around the Cafcass recommendation is not a mandatory field and therefore is not entered for all cases.
We only record what the outcome of the case is and not the reasons for the outcome.
Safeguarding issues have been recorded on CMS only from June 2008.
It may be possible to discuss your request further to ascertain what information we do hold and which you may be interested in
If you do have any queries about this letter do contact me on 0844 353 3317 or via e-mail. Please remember to quote the reference number in future communications.
If you are unhappy with the decisions made in relation to your request, you may ask for an internal review to be undertaken. If you are dissatisfied with the way the internal review is handled or with the final decision made at that review about the information released, you are free to contact the Information Commissioner's office (www.informationcommissioner.gov.uk)
Post Fax
Information Commissioner's Office 01625 524 510
Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire
SK9 5AF
Yours sincerely,
Miss Jasvinder Jassal
Corporate Governance Officer
Baroness Valerie Howarth Chair
Anthony Douglas CBE Chief Executive
Cafcass, the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service, is a non-departmental public body of the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF)