LF v A NHS Trust & Ors [2022] EWCOP 8

Application by father of G, his adult daughter, to discharge reporting restrictions in proceedings relating to where she should be cared for when she is discharged from her current placement in a children’s hospital (see also G, Re [2021] EWCOP 69)

The applicant, LF, sought to discharge the restrictions so the family could begin a crowdfunding campaign to buy a specially adapted vehicle to help G get around: some celebrities had said they would back the campaign and the family had also been approached by two national newspapers. 

Hayden J rejects the application. Partly this was in the light of a blog written ostensibly in G’s own voice that reflected LF’s determination to get G a move to the care of her parents and which Hayden J found revealed LF’s refusal to accept the earlier judgment that G should move to ‘A’ home. He also contrasted the situation in these proceedings with that in Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust v Verden where the purpose in lifting reporting restrictions was to find a donor to save the child’s life. While he notes that LF’s right to freedom of speech is an important one at [26] Hayden J states that it is not curtailed 

“merely because what he wishes to say to the media is, on all the available evidence, misguided, and inaccurate, rather it is because it is in direct conflict with his daughter's rights as I have analysed them.”

​Read the judgment on Bailii