More regulation is clearly not the best way to stop another Baby P
Dear Ed Balls,
Since becoming Secretary of State, you have demonstrated your love of centralised control in education and children’s services beyond any reasonable doubt. Removing the freedoms that City Academies enjoyed under Tony Blair is a good example of how you detest individual responsibility and independence from government. Like Gordon Brown, your response to the Baby P case has been weak, verging on embarrassing. After declaring that “I am not going to do the easy political thing and seek a headline”, you have spent several days trying to lure the public into thinking that you have the necessary solutions for this terrible tragedy – which you evidently do not and have therefore resorted to scoring political points instead.
Over the past few days, your judgement has been underwhelming and led me to conclude that you are desperate to show strength when your underlying response conveys quite the contrary. Last Thursday, you announced in typically dramatic Labour fashion that staff will be held accountable, yet to date only three employees of Haringey Council have been sent written warnings and none of them have been fired. Not much accountability there, it seems. Your decision not to criticise the internal case review of Baby P carried out by Haringey social services also brings in question your desire for accountability. You went on to say that “I would think everybody in Haringey is sorry” and the government had to make sure that lessons were learnt. Talk about political posturing – care to put any substance behind all this? Need I remind you that no-one in Haringey social services has resigned or apologised? The only person in Haringey to apologise to the media has been a local councillor. Labour have been telling us for the last year or so that they will ‘learn the lessons’, be it the 10p tax rate humiliation or the death of a small child. How about you stop telling us that you’re learning lessons and show us that you’ve learned something instead? Victoria Climbie died in 2000 on Labour’s watch in Haringey but you obviously didn’t bother learning those lessons.
After days of hearing how you’ll investigate this problem, we learn of your solution: more centralised control. Oh, joy. Straight from the Labour minister’s manual to Westminster politics- “if in need of a quick press release, set up or expand a quango to kid the public into thinking that you’re doing something instead of sitting on your backside achieving sod all.” You will announce today that every part of England is going to be covered by a Children’s Trust Board. These boards, which are supposed to co-ordinate child protection workers, will also be strengthened where they already exist. Not unsurprisingly, you try to impress us with your illusion of control in the Baby P case by stating categorically that child protection agencies are failing to intervene early enough in some cases. Based on what evidence, may I ask? Have you suddenly accumulated evidence to support this stance since Baby P died? I doubt it. These Children’s Trust Boards were set up after Victoria Climbie died in a very Blair-esque way to convince the public that he was doing something remotely useful and now here you are jumping on the same bandwagon to limit any political fallout that you might experience from this horrific case of child abuse. These boards will have little more than a supervisory role and will add an extra set of hoops to jump through with their ‘minimum standards’ for children’s services (which sounds pretty ridiculous, given that all local authorities already have statutory child protection duties). Surely we should be giving more powers to social services and the police instead of tying their hands even tighter behind their backs with more regulation?
In your speech today to directors of children’s services, you will make the totally unsubstantiated claim that “organisational barriers and competing priorities appear to be getting in the way” of child protection. Of course, your solution to these barriers and competing priorities is to add another layer of bureaucracy. Saying that “I will not rest until we have the very best possible child protection arrangements to safeguard our most vulnerable children in every part of the country” is classic Labour political huffing and puffing and, as in so many cases, your centralised top-down bureaucracy-laden solutions are woefully inadequate. Last month the Audit Commission concluded the Children’s Trusts Boards had made little difference to children’s services and they often lacked clear direction and had made slow progress. Your response to this? Claiming that the Audit Commission review was ‘out-of-date’. For a man who said only last week that seeking a political headline and a quick fix was not on your agenda, you have a funny way of showing it.
Yours sincerely,
A.Tory
But how could more regulation possibly help?
The social workers whinge that it is the regulation and paperwork introduced after Climbie that keep them from doing their work. Yet they managed 50-60 visits to P.
The fact remains, they knew of P, and they knew P was at risk. They had the resources to visit P, and they were aware of their duties to P as shown by the extensive discussions between social services and the police. The resources were there to protect P; the powers were available; the regulatory structures worked. They simply made the wrong decision.
The question is therefore quite simple; could a reasonable person, without the benefit of hindsight, have reached a better decision based on the evidence that was available to them through their many visits?
If so, it is time to replace the people who took the decision with reasonable people.
If not, it is time to recognise that the State cannot guarantee perfection for all and will, from time to time, fail to prevent people from doing terrible things.
I agree Patently – this wasn’t a systemic failure except insofar as the system permitted such an appalling failure of judgement as seems to have been collectively exercised by the leadership of Haringey Social Services. Tragic as it is, what happened is that some people broadly in possession of all the facts made the wrong decision with deadly consequences.
We can’t regulate common sense. Perhaps there’s a case to be made at how systems can be constructed to catch such errors in the future but there’s no reason to believe that these should be centrally controlled from Whitehall.
Sounds like we agree that Balls has ballsed this up. Labour’s first and only instinct is to bring control higher up the chain, which is precisely what Balls is doing, but I also believe that problems lie with the individuals who made the decisions.
I’m sure that the 1989 children’s act does place some constraints on social services, but when the police say that a child needs to go into care yet social services refuse their request, individual heads need to roll.
It’s so clear. Less regulation, better people employed as employers, better people employed, less incompetence, smaller government.
Indeed. Social services cannot be run from Whitehall. Local authorities must have every necessary power at their disposal, including taking children into care, and decisions made about children’s safety cannot be bound by some centralised dictat cooked up in the spur of the moment by a government desperate to placate the public and look busy.
what is clear is that social services visited 60 times or more, and despite the horrific injuries reported in the press they were unable to save thie baby’s life. I don’t know how they sleep at night.
I hope they can’t sleep at night.
The IEA said this slightly more succinctly.
With the greatest of respect, the IEA didn’t talk about the political points-scoring that infuriated me almost as much as Labour’s obsession with regulation.
If you’ve nothing of substance to say or are incapable of either explaining a complicated message, or conveying that you have a complicated message and the proles can’t understand it because 60 years of British education have failed to deliver cognoscente voters, then you are left with going for the lowest common denomentator: attacking the other fella…