Hugh Jones shows photos of his wife, his stepson, and the new baby daughter he may never meet. They are living as fugitives abroad. He has only just got out of prison. Last September, he helped his pregnant wife Sarah to flee to France with her eight-year-old son Sam, who had been taken into care. The couple believed that the local authority had plans for both children – Hugh’s stepson and his then unborn daughter – to be adopted. As a result, he was sentenced to 16 months in jail and his family are on the run. No one can tell what kind of life the children are living. The crude, homemade card on the mantelpiece, with “Happy Father’s Day” and hearts drawn in ballpoint, does not suggest luxury.

Was his an act of heroism? Or an abduction perpetrated by a man under the spell of a woman who is believed by the courts to have emotionally harmed her first child? This case highlights the dilemnas that judges face, and raises questions about the secrecy in which social workers and family courts operate: The Times has launched a campaign for openness.

Hugh admits that he broke the law. “Yes. I pleaded guilty,” he says calmly. We are in the front room of his sister’s semi, with coffee mugs on trays and a cat sprawled on the carpet. Does this 56-year-old businessman and grandfather really think that he did the right thing?

“To protect my family, yes” he says slowly. “We should never have been put in a situation where I found myself at four in the morning in a car park near the foster carers’ home, seeing my stepson exuberant, jumping around, thrilled at being with his mum. She was scared. They were about to embark on a journey – whether for a few days or for ever we didn’t know, I felt I had to protect them.”

Sam (a pseudonym, as are all the names in this story) climbed out of the window of his foster parents’ home on the night of September 10, 2007. Hugh then drove him and Sarah to Dover in his Ford Focus and on to France. A few days later Hugh came back alone. “I thought she would be able to persuade Sam to come home, but he felt safer in France.”

Did he expect to go to jail? “No, never. At the police station I kept asking why Medway social services hadn’t talked to me about the situation but they never bothered.”

But you abducted a child, I say. A child who didn’t know you (Sam was put in care before his mother met Hugh). “No,” he says, suddenly emphatic. “That night in the car park he ran at me shouting, ‘I’m free, I’m free, please come to France with us’.”

The background to this case is complicated. Sarah’s first marriage was to a man who was aggressive and volatile. Social workers had become concerned that Sam was suffering emotional harm from witnessing the conflict between his parents. When Sarah sued for divorce, a judge ordered that the boy be taken into temporary foster care while she sorted her life out. But the boy was not returned after the divorce, because of concerns that there was continuing conflict between his parents. Sarah was not supposed to suggest to Sam that he might ever return to her care. The father had issues with his “gender identity”, and Sam was said to “overidentify with the mother’s point of view”. When Hugh met Sarah, Sam had been in care for more than a year. Was he too readily influenced by her?

“The care proceedings were very harrowing,” he says. “Sarah kept a lot to herself to start with; I think she was trying to shield me from it. But when you’re in what seems like an Alice through the Looking Glass situation, you have to look into it for yourself. I approached the situation like any business problem. I talked to her relatives, her old neighbours, the vicar, people whose accounts she did, even the village gossips.” What view did he come to? “That social services were either trying to achieve their adoption targets or pandering to an implacably hostile exhusband.”

But wasn’t he incredibly naive? Why did he come back from France? “Because this problem needed to be sorted out. And we had an outstandingly good case. Two critical reports, on which court judgments were based, have never been tested in court. Neither Sarah nor I have been allowed to challenge them. And we have a report from a highly respected psychologist, who has read all the papers and concluded that she cannot understand why the child is not with his mother.”

The psychologist was due to give evidence in October. But that hearing never took place because Hugh was in jail and Sarah was in France. So why on earth did they flout the law? Why didn’t they wait for the hearing? “Because Sam would already have been adopted. The goodbye meeting [when a mother meets her child for the last time before adoption] was scheduled for September. She was to tell him that she was having a baby and that the baby would replace him. They were hoping to place him with a lesbian couple in London.”

I ask him if Sarah is a strong character. “She’s full of life, clever, different. She’s the only woman in the village you’ll find herding goats, or giving pony rides at the fête. But she’s not a strong character. She spent years being worn down in a difficult relationship. She is not forceful. She gets indignant, like a cornered cat.”

How was prison? “Traumatic. The first wing I was on, 16 out of 40 prisoners had been in care. They were supportive. But it was very unnerving.

“He went grey,” says his sister. Hugh is slim, sprightly-looking, with laughter lines around his eyes. But his eyes now are sombre and his hair is grey. “I’ve travelled the world, my first wife died in my arms, I have inner strength,” he says. Which he used in prison to study law. “I spent a lot of time studying the Children Act, why councils are mis-using it and why the family courts function in the way they do. A French prisoner told me that a French judge will put his hat and coat on and go to the family home and manage things. Here judges place undue reliance upon experts. Some are manipulative. Who pays the piper plays the tune.”

O nly then do I notice the boxes stacked up in the hall, full of papers. He is preparing for a fight. But a huge hurdle is that he is not allowed to be party to the care proceedings for either his stepson or his baby. “Just after I got out of prison,” he says, “there was a meeting to discuss my daughter and how Medway would take her into care. I had papers prepared, a solicitor ready. They would not let me in. But this is my child. Sarah’s exhusband was there, discussing my child with the professionals. My human rights have been set aside if they are discussing my baby and I am not party to the discussions.”

How does it feel never to have seen his new baby? “You have no idea. I don’t cry a lot but . . . ”

“Hugh adores babies,” interupts his sister. “He held his other daughters as soon as they were born.”

“If the lack of social services cooperation goes on she will never come back to this country,” Hugh says, “That’s why I’m spending enormous amounts of time and money to try to get Medway to cooperate. We will go to the appeal court, the House of Lords, to Europe.”

How will he fund it? “The estimate is quarter of a million. I’ve sold my house, my car. I'm extraordinarily lucky in that I own a piece of land, I’m building 20 flats. So some of my retirement money is going to be spent on ensuring the future of my family, but I don’t begrudge that at all.”

Does he have any regrets? “I’m just glad that my family are removed from what’s going on in court and in the press. Sarah will not tell me where they are.” Has he not felt like giving up? “No. This is my family. If I gave up, where would that leave them?”

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