Vulnerable children face a greater risk of harm because of a dramatic rise in the cost of taking them into care, ministers have been warned.

Fees for care proceedings are to leap next month from £150 to £4,000 per case — a jump of 2,500 per cent — as the courts are made to pay for themselves.

Judges, as well as the Law Society and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, have said that the fees will deter local authorities from seeking care orders promptly, or at all. As a result, they say, hard-up councils are more likely to give parents a second chance or put pressure on other family members to look after children.

The unprecedented opposition has come from the Family Justice Council, an umbrella body chaired by Britain’s most senior judge, Sir Mark Potter; from the Council of Circuit Judges and from the Association of District Judges.

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Bridget Prentice, the Justice Minister, said last week that an extra £40 million would be given to local authorities to cover the costs of court fees in care cases. However, judges and lawyers point out that the money will not be ring-fenced and may be used for other purposes.

District Judge Michael Buckley, in a paper for the Association of District Judges, said that the fees’ rise would be a “significant disincentive” to local authorities to go to court to take children into care. In borderline cases, social workers might be persuaded “possibly against their better judgment to monitor cases rather than initiate proceedings”, he said. He added that he was worried that councils short of money would “allow some vulnerable children to slip through the net” by failing to intervene promptly”.

The Family Justice Council — a mix of judges, lawyers and lay people — said that a recent straw poll of 50 judges specialising in these cases found that none had experience of a care case being brought prematurely or needlessly. By contrast, it found that every judge had experience of cases “inappropriately delayed by poor decision-making by local authorities”. If anything,local authorities tended to be too slow in instituting care proceedings.

The tragedies of cases such as that of Victoria Climbié showed acutely what can happen when local authorities fail to intervene robustly, the council said.

Official figures on the number of care proceedings brought each year are disputed but are thought to range from 15,000 to 20,000.

The family sub-committee of the Council of Circuit Judges cited similar concerns and expressed “dismay” at the short consultation on the fees. It challenged the whole notion of such cases having to be self-financing because of the delicate nature of the proceedings, which involves the state seeking to protect children. “It is not far-fetched to make the analogy with an attempt to make the Crown Prosecution Service or the police pay to bring a criminal case,” a spokesperson said.

Andrew Holroyd, President of the Law Society, said: “This rise could effectively price children involved in care disputes out of court and deny them the right to justice that they need.

“Rather than court proceedings being issued, it is likely that compromises will be reached that are influenced more by financial considerations than what is best for these children, leaving them at risk and without a voice.”

Dame Mary Marsh, the chief executive of the NSPCC, said: “It is a matter of public interest to ensure that children are kept safe and have access to justice. There is a real and serious risk that vulnerable children and their families will be prevented from having full access to justice . . . because some decisions could be finance-led.”

Judges are also worried that a new procedure to reduce delays in care cases which has just come into force could be another reason for local authorities to seek to spend less money.

Stephen Gerlis, a district judge, said: “Cynics might say that the increase [in fees] is designed to dissuade councils from issuing proceedings, and they would not be far wrong.” Ministers had admitted, he said, that the new care procedure (called the public law outline) was to discourage “unnecessary and premature use of care proceedings” and that the proposed fees were designed to “support the objectives of these reforms”. Similarly, family circuit judges have argued that the new care procedure “must not provide a disincentive to care proceedings being taken promptly where the safety of a child is at stake”.

However, Ms Prentice has dismissed the notion that authorities will be resource-driven, pointing out that they have a statutory duty to protect children at risk of significant harm.

“Both the Local Government Association and the Association of Directors of Children’s Services confirmed that local authorities are not influenced by cost considerations in their approach to initiating proceedings,” she said.

The minister added that, in practice, most local authorities paid court fees from a legal department or central budget and not from a children’s services budget overseen by the social workers working on the cases.

Court fees were also a small proportion of the overall cost of child care proceedings, she said.

Young lives in peril

150 children die from maltreatment in England and Wales each year

35 children killed by a parent each year

400,000 children considered to be “in need”, either as potential victims of abuse or neglect or through lack of parental supervision

20,000 care proceedings every year

400 newborn babies taken into care in 2005-06

2,800 children under 12 months taken into care in 2005; 1,600 in 1995

Sources: The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health

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