custody

Hi all, am after some advice if anyone can help, since september 09 i have had residence of my two daughters, however recently my ex girlfriend(the girls mother,),has been messing around with dates and times for seeing and picking up/dropping off the girls, we had a verbal agreement that she would have them on a wednesday night, and then sunday morning to dropping them off at school on the monday. however recently she has begun to turn up late, demand changes to dates sha has them, there is also the question of the girls welfare which have been coming to light and to be honest has shocked myself and partner(who is more of a mother to my daughters than she has been)i do have shared parental responsibility which was a long and drawn out process, i also have residence, but as explained by my solicitor the courts do not tend to get involved at this stage with court orders unless a breach or concerns come to light, do i have grounds to apply for full custody
thanks all for reading and hopefully someone can help

Hi Mate,
Not quite sure what you mean here as residence IS custody.
What was once an application for custody is now called Residency.
Meaning who the children live with.

When you were awarded residency was there not a contact order also issued for your ex?
If so then by changing times and dates she is in breach of that order.

I would get a solicitors letter off to her warning that continued changes to contact times and dates may result in contact being stopped for the sake of the childrens welfare and she will then have to go to court for a/another contact order.
The letter may make her buck up a bit.

In the UK the terms 'custody' and 'access' were changed to 'residence' and 'contact' some years ago. Are there any court orders in place or when you say residence and shared parental responsibility do you mean the children live with you or you have a shared residence order + PR? How old are the girls?

I agree with Tom - it's worth checking out the terminology.

I have no children from my 2nd marriage so not sure how the new language works - but in my first divorce (22 yrs ago) we had 'joint custody' - with 'access' for dad and 'care and control' for me; that's how the order was written. Care and control, I think, is what is now called residence. Joint custody worked as in joint parental responsibility.

Get some advice on where you stand - I've interpreted what you said as you haven't yet been to court so no court orders exist? If that's the case, then everything you have depends on agreement between the two of you. That's fine as long as you agree.

My experience of that is we started out in the same way until, in anger, my ex took our daughter (then 3) and wouldn't bring her back. Since he had created a disturbance and done some damage, the police attended and, though they prevented him taking our son (then 18 mths), they had no power to force him to return our daughter as there were no court orders. We had an emergency interim 'custody' order granted 3 days later, ordering him to return her.

Things can change very quickly when the 2 parties cease to agree. It's worth preparing your ground in that eventuality.

Good luck

Shezi

Ok. I've looked at previous posts and it seems you have been separated for 6 years and until September this year the girls lived with the Mother. There are now informal arrangements for the girls to stay with the Mother 2 nights a week. The girls are 8 & 9, there are no court orders in place and twice recently she has changed arrangements so your plans to spend quality time with your new girlfriend were ruined.

Unless there is more to this (welfare concerns??) I can't see an application for residence being successful. Sorry. The children seemed to have survived satisfactorily under the Mother's care for 6 years and courts will not make a residence order unless it will be better for the child. These days the outcome of many residence applications is shared residence.

However, either party can apply for an order to regulate contact although there is still no guarantee that contact will be taken up. Apart from scoring an own goal and having less quality time to spend with your girlfriend withdrawing contact is a draconian thing to do (unless circumstances are exceptional) because it is emotionally damaging for children when one parent thinks the other parent is too awful for them to spend time with.

Being inconsistent and unreliable about arrangements is also damaging to children but children need at least one parent who will forgo the determination of who is right and who is wrong and put their interests first. Have you tried discussion, compromise and a flexible approach?

The new terminology is supposed to introduce a new way of looking at things.

'Custody' meant who had effective 'ownership' of a child; 'residence' refers simply to whom a child lives with.

'Access' referred to an adult's right to spend time with a child; 'contact' refers to the child's right to spend time with an adult.

In practice not a great deal has changed, partly because many lawyers and judges are still stuck in the old mind-set.

PR is another concept introduced by the 1989 Act.

In the present case, new.to.this, we need to know if the existing order is for sole or shared residence, and if there is an order for defined contact. Are you saying that you have sole residence and your ex has contact? In which case are you suggesting that she should have that contact withdrawn? Or are you saying you have shared residence, and you want to change that to sole residence in your favour with contact for your ex?

Either way I doubt a court would be particularly cooperative since shared residence is viewed as the arrangement couples should be working towards. A court would need to have very good reasons to change that arrangement, particularly if, as you say, it took a great deal of court time to achieve it. What are the welfare concerns, and why didn't they come to light before?

I went to the sol, she basically said the courts wouldnt give me full custody as there are no grounds the mother hasnt been violent etc, instead she reccomended mediation to resolve the problem and is sending out a letter to the girls mother stating she must stick to dates and times otherwise it will stop altogether,...