How to succeed in a relocation application?

If you live in England and want to move back to live in France with your children, here are some practical tips to give your application the best chance of success.

Key Takeaways:

• If the other parent has parental responsibility and does not agree to the move, you must obtain the English court’s permission before relocating your children’s habitual residence to France.
• A relocation application is a lengthy process: you should generally allow 9 to 12 months for a final decision, although exceptional cases may be resolved sooner.
• The section 7 report and your written statement are crucial elements of the case, as the court will focus on whether the move is in your children’s best interests.
• Your statement should provide a clear, genuine and well-supported explanation of why relocation is necessary, together with concrete proposals for maintaining the children’s relationship with the other parent.
• If the court authorises the relocation, you may also need to obtain a “mirror order” in France to ensure that the English judgment can be recognised and implemented there.

Joint parental responsibility — agreement or the judge’s permission

If the second parent shares parental responsibility with you, you will need to obtain their consent before moving your children’s habitual residence to France. The second parent holds parental responsibility under English law if their name appears on the child’s birth certificate, and under French law if you are married, or if the second parent has legally acknowledged the child.

If you decide not to seek the other parent’s agreement even though they share parental responsibility with you, then your move to France will amount to parental child abduction. Your plan will come to an abrupt halt, because parental abduction is a criminal offence under Article 227-7 of the French Criminal Code. The penalty is 1 year’s imprisonment and a €15,000 fine. The 1980 Hague Convention on the civil aspects of international child abduction works extremely well between England and France. The French judge will order the summary return of your children to England, and you will have lost all credibility before the English court as to your intentions to preserve the other parent’s parental rights.

So if the other parent does not consent to the change in your children’s habitual residence to France, or if they oppose enrolling the children in a school in France, then you absolutely must seek the English judge’s permission.

Starting the proceedings — Form C100

This means filing an application under section 8 of the Children Act 1989. You need to fill in Form C100 and specifically ask the English court for permission to move your children’s habitual residence to France. You can apply online. You can also send the application by email to the court covering the area where you live. As of September 2026, the court fee for this application is £270.

Timing

Be careful, these are lengthy proceedings, so obtaining the judge’s permission in under 6 months will only be possible in exceptional cases. As a general rule, you should allow 9 months to a year to reach the end of the process and obtain a final decision.

Proceedings

Once your application has been issued, CAFCASS (Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service) will contact you to arrange a telephone call so you can explain your plans and your reasons. At this stage there is no need to go into precise detail. The CAFCASS officer’s role will be to send what is called a “safeguarding letter” to the court. In other words, the officer must inform the court and state whether your family is known to the police or to social services.

The letter will note that, since this is an application to relocate internationally, the parties will need to file statements, and that CAFCASS will need to produce a section 7 report to determine whether it is in your children’s best interests to move to France. Once the CAFCASS officer has filed their letter with the court, the court will set a first hearing date.

Direction Appointment

This is the first hearing. It is a procedural hearing. From this first hearing onward, you can try to obtain the full procedural timetable, that is, the intermediate hearing (Dispute Resolution Appointment) and the final hearing, which will be listed for 2 days. You will need to make an important decision at the first hearing, one that will affect the timeframe of the proceedings. The judge will order that a section 7 report be produced.

This report can be prepared free of charge by CAFCASS, or on a paid basis by an Independent Social Worker. At present in London, as of September 2026, you should expect to wait of around 23 weeks to obtain a section 7 report from CAFCASS. If you choose to pay for a report, an Independent Social Worker will currently complete their report within 8 to 10 weeks, at a cost ranging between £4,000 to £8,000 + VAT.

Section 7 Report

The CAFCASS officer, or the private expert you have instructed, will review the documents filed with the court, in particular your statements, and will carry out all the necessary enquiries to produce their report. The expert’s work must indicate whether it is in the child’s best interests to change their routine and go to live in France.

To do this, depending on the children’s degree of maturity, the expert will set out the children’ wishes and feelings. The expert will give their view on the risks that the change of residence poses for the children, and also for the parents. This report will be crucial, because in most cases the court will follow the expert’s opinion.

Statements

Your statement will be THE key document in your proceedings. It is the narrative you set out over a maximum of 15 pages, explaining why it is in your children’s best interests to move to France. You may have several arguments, for example that your job is being relocated to France, that you no longer have the financial resources to remain in England, that your mental health has deteriorated badly in England and you can show that your support network is in France, that the help you will receive is in France.

You may attach supporting documents. You will only get to file one statement, so your document needs to be thorough, genuine, and above all it needs to set out concrete proposals for visits and holidays for the other parent. The parent leaving England often has to show that they are being generous when it comes to holidays. They will therefore suggest that the other parent have more holiday time with the children.

Dispute Resolution Appointment (DRA)

Once the section 7 report has been produced, there will be a second hearing at court to see whether you can reach an agreement with the other parent. If this hearing does not result in an agreement, you will need to prepare for the final hearing.

Final Hearing

A straightforward relocation case usually lasts 2 days. On the first day, the expert is cross-examined, as are both parents. The second day is for closing submissions and for the judgment to be handed down.

When the judge gives their decision, they may sometimes require you to take the necessary steps to obtain what is called a “mirror order” in France, that is, a French order or judgment that reproduces the same terms as your English judgment.