In the immediate aftermath of the Angela Cannings judgment, it looked as if social services departments throughout the land were heading for meltdown. Cannings was freed in December when her conviction for murdering two baby sons was quashed on appeal because the judges came to doubt the medical evidence on which it was based.
Specifically, they were concerned about the approach adopted by the prosecution expert, Professor Sir Roy Meadow, a retired paediatrician whose rule of thumb was: unless proven otherwise, one cot death is tragedy, two is suspicious, and three is murder.
On January 19, the appeal court called a halt to further prosecutions of parents when expert opinion was divided on the cause of death.
Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general, ordered a review of 258 cases in which a parent had been convicted within the last 10 years of killing a child under two. In cases of sudden infant death, it was unsafe to convict if there was serious disagreement between experts on the cause, he said.
A day later, Harriet Harman, the solicitor general, told MPs about the implications for child protection. If it was unsafe to convict parents under criminal law on the basis of misguided expert evidence, it must also have been wrong to take children away from parents under civil law on the same grounds.
Harman said: "We will make sure ... any potential injustices in care proceedings are identified and acted on ... We bear in mind the absolute, utmost gravity and seriousness of those whose injustice is not in the hands of the criminal justice system, but as a result of the family justice system."
She seemed to have in mind cases in which suspected mothers were not prosecuted for harming their children, but had them taken away by court order in care proceedings brought by a local authority. Some mothers who were thought to have harmed an older child also had subsequent children taken into care at birth.
Initial reports suggested thousands of parents might have been wronged over the past 10 years because their children were seized on the basis of disputed medical evidence.
As Margaret Hodge, the children's minister, began work last month on new guidelines to identify such cases, alarm spread among social services chiefs. Did this mean they had to review a decade of files?
Alison King, Conservative chairwoman of the Local Government Association's social services committee, says: "We got the impression that children's departments were going to be landed with enormous work on a tight timetable. To me the whole thing seemed like a can of worms. It made adoptive parents feel uncertain and you have to take their rights into account.
"We thought thousands of cases would have to be reviewed. But, having heard things were going to be expedited, it has gone quiet."
The quiet may not last long. Hodge is getting ready to publish the guidelines, maybe as soon as the end of this week. All the signs are that she will take a narrow view of the Cannings judgment and avoid administrative upheaval in local authorities.
Harman's words in the Commons may have raised hopes among thousands of parents whose children were taken into care. They included mothers accused of harming - but not killing - their children, according to a pattern of behaviour known as Munchausen syndrome by proxy.
But Hodge is likely to rule that the judgment affects only those cases in which a child died and in which medical experts disagreed about the cause.
This was the approach taken by Andrew Cozens, president of the Association of Directors of Social Services (ADSS), in a statement designed to reassure his colleagues on January 21. He said: "It is important nobody over-reacts concerning the implications of the judgment ... No child will have been adopted or taken into care solely on the basis of expert witnesses."
Cozens told the Guardian his best guess of the number of cases affected by the Cannings judgment was 100. All these are current cases still under review by the courts. Local authority lawyers would be asked to look through their bundles and refer back any cases that might have been decided on expert testimony. They might include those in which the local authority employed an expert witness, such as Meadow, but the parents did not.
But he stresses that there would be no review of cases in which the children were already adopted, because those adoptions could not be overturned. "Local authorities must have regard to the interests of the child now - not 10 years ago - and not the interests of the parents," Cozens says.
If natural parents are aggrieved about how a child was taken from them, they would have to apply to the courts for compensation, he adds. Hodge's department is taking advice on this aspect of the problem from Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, England's top family judge.
The ADSS approach sounds a long way from Harman's mission to root out injustice, and Hodge is bound to be criticised if she adopts it.
In contrast, Allan Levy QC, an expert on child law, says Hodge should contact all local authorities involved in cases over the past 10 years in which children were taken away from their natural parents on the basis of expert evidence, particularly those involving Meadow. They should review any doubtful case coming within the guidelines set by the court of appeal. He believes there could well be "several hundred such cases".
Levy says adoptions could only be overturned in the most exceptional circumstances, involving fraud or procedural error. But Felicity Collier, chief executive of BAAF Adoption and Fostering, disagrees. She says that establishing whether children were wrongly taken from their parents might be important for the children in the long run.
As they grew older, they had a "right to discover as much as they could about whether their parents harmed them", she says. If their removal from their natural parents was triggered by flawed expert evidence, they should be allowed to learn the truth, she says.
Although legal adoptions could not be overturned, Collier says, it was relevant to ask how well the child was progressing. Counsellors, working with natural parents and adoptive parents, could examine whether the child might have more contact with the birth family, she adds.
Hodge must now consider where to strike the balance. She would be pilloried if she allowed children to die by returning them to violent parents. But parents who had children taken away unjustifiably will be violated again if she takes the easy administrative option and allows past mistakes to remain buried.
No wonder she is understood to consider this to be one of her more difficult decisions since becoming children's minister.
