A COURT ordered Somerset County Council yesterday to pay the six-figure legal costs of a disabled teenager removed from her family’s care without proper investigation of her circumstances.

Council social workers prevented the woman, now 20, from returning home because of bruises on her chest.

Despite her mother’s warning, social workers decided that bruises on the severely disabled woman were signs of “significant injury from someone or something other than herself.”

Staff at the specialised school the woman attended had seen her hit herself the day before the bruises appeared — information the judge deemed “easily discoverable” if social workers had carried out a “proper investigation.”

“We sought to persuade the court that the local authority had acted unreasonably in its conduct of the proceedings and that consequently, there should be a departure from the normal position with regards costs,” said the family’s solicitor Catrin Blake.

“The usual position in Court of Protection proceedings is that no party will be liable to pay the costs of another.

“There are however exceptions to that rule and we successfully argued that this case was one of those exceptions.

“The way in which the local authority insisted on continuing to seek findings against the family or claim that the family could not meet (the woman’s) needs, despite evidence to the contrary, meant that we were able to argue that they had acted unreasonably.”