Adoption: whether consent should be dispensed with and freeing granted.

Plumtree, Alexandra

Aberdeen City Council v O Sheriffdom of Grampian, Highland and Islands at Aberdeen Sheriff M Garden 8 February 2011

This application for a freeing order under section 18 of the Adoption (Scotland) Act 1978, applied for before 28 September 2009, was granted. The sheriff held that it was competent to grant such an order after 28 September 2010, despite the implications of the transitional provisions for the 2007 Act.

Note

There have been a number of decisions about whether it is competent for freeing orders to be granted after 28 September 2010. The Adoption and Children (Scotland) Act 2007 (Commencement No. 4, Transitional and Savings Provisions) Order 2009, SSI 2009/267, implied that all applications would be finished by then. In Dundee City Council, Petitioners (17 May 2010, previously reported in Adoption & Fostering 34:2, 2010, p 81), Sheriff D Pyle decided that if the case was not completed by 28 September 2010, it could still proceed and would not be barred by the transitional provisions. However, a number of sheriffs have held that it is not competent to grant freeings after 28 September 2010, although none of these judgements or views has appeared on the Scottish Courts website. In another case, parties agreed not to dispute the competency point, but when the freeing order was granted, the birth parents appealed against it as incompetent.

(1) These short notes outline a number of recent family law cases. They are available on the Scottish Courts website (www.scotcourts.gov.uk) except the first one, which is on the Supreme Court's website (www.supremecourt.gov.uk) under Decided Cases.

Alexandra Plumtree, Legal Consultant at BAAF's Scottish Centre, prepared these notes