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You may not yet have come across “the suspended residence order”. it was invented by me last year to deal with the case I was mentioning earlier. The Court of Appeal has now given this new tool its blessing on two occasions and it is now reported as Re A (suspended residence order) 2010 1 FLR 1679. It works in the same way as a suspended committal order but without the irritating technicalities attached to enforcement by committal. The court attaches clear conditions which if breached lead to immediate removal of the children to the other parent. The advantage of this order, in these intractable cases, is that the outcome lies entirely in the hands of the defaulting parent (which, of course, is made clear to him or her at the time of the making of the order). In the “A” case the suspension had to be lifted and the police finally moved the children earlier this year to their long suffering grandparents. It was all pretty grim but they are now having full and unsupervised contact to the father they had not seen for properly for four years. There are three conditions I would attach to this suspended residence order approach. Firstly, and obviously, the judge must be satisfied, at the time the suspended order is made, that the alternative home is good enough. Secondly, it must be made abundantly clear to the parent concerned that you really mean what you say, and finally there must be judicial continuity throughout. The authority must come from the judge not the process.
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