Professor John Mee:

To some extent, it is a bit like saying what happens if there was a crime and nobody knew about it. What if somebody got away with murder? If someone got away with murder, in principle there should have been the severance and they should not have been allowed from that moment, but we never found out and they got away with it. In other words, the law is constrained by the facts of reality and whether we know what happened. If we know what happened, however, the family can go forward and say there is going to be a severance from that date. In theory, if it happened but nobody knows that it happened, that is life. It is like saying someone got away with murder.