Letters From A Tory Daily views on British politics and the Conservative Party from a centre-right thinker who writes letters on his blog to politicians, journalists and many others.

Dear Ed Balls,

There appears to be a growing consensus that you represent the very worst aspects of the Labour Party – arrogance, incompetence and disdain at the heart of Gordon Brown’s inner circle.  Yesterday’s announcement on the recruitment and retention of social workers after the death of Baby P might sound like good news, but it is in fact the epitome of why Labour have failed and will continue to fail.  There are several features of Labour policymaking that have become regular fixtures over the past decade or so and I find it absolutely astonishing that after all this time, Labour keep making the same mistakes time and time again.  Below is a list of how Labour solve problems and why, yet again, these solutions are doomed to fail.

ANNOUNCE MORE FUNDING: even in these dark economic times, Labour still manage to find a few extra million – £58 million in this case – to throw at a problem.  Indeed, every Labour minister is still totally hooked on the idea that if you throw money at something, it will necessarily improve.  This correlation has been proven false repeatedly since 1997 but you still aren’t learning.

PANDER TO THE PUBLIC: This new policy includes members of the public sitting on child protection boards, who will report on their effectiveness.  Members of the public overseeing child protection policy?!  My god, who on earth thought that totally ill-informed and untrained individuals are well placed to pass judgement on protecting vulnerable children?  This strikes me as another ‘Victim’s Commissioner’-esque media-friendly waste of time that will probably put even more children at risk.

IGNORE THE UNDERLYING CAUSES OF THE PROBLEM: You announced £58 million for this recruitment campaign to try and lure former social workers back to the profession, yet the funding for frontline social workers has not changed and you have completely avoided the issue of why these social workers left in the first place.  Could it be that they are sick and tired of being turned into box-tickers, that they are not allowed to exercise their professional judgement, that they are run by Whitehall instead of monitoring their own work, that they are treated like second-class citizens, that they are underpaid and overworked?  Do ya think that might have contributed to their departure from the profession?  Do you honestly think that some extra university places for social workers will help keep people in the profession for a longer period of time?

ADD ANOTHER QUANGO: You’ve also announced a new cross-government “safeguarding delivery unit” which will apparently ’drive improvements across frontline services’ and ’support and challenge local authorities and Children’s Trusts.’  Oh great, just what they were hoping for – more regulation, more quangos to deal with, more paperwork.

ADD MORE TARGETS: Conservative MP Tim Loughton told the Commons during a debate on Tuesday that paperwork prevented carers from doing work on the ground and the latest changes were thin on detail. “We are being expected here… to impose a series of new targets, the number of which, the nature of which, the questions of which we do not know,” he said.  How anyone in the Labour Party can still think new targets help anyone, particularly those at the most vulnerable end of society, is beyond me.

ROPE IN A NEW GOVERNMENT EXPERT: Your new measures include appointing former head of the Barnado’s charity Sir Roger Singleton as chief adviser on child safety to report annually to Parliament on how to effectively implement child protection across Britain (a cynic might ask why it took an incident like Baby P to bring this about if it was such a good idea in the first place).  On the issue of ‘experts’, Liz Davies, a social worker and senior lecturer in child protection, has criticised Lord Laming himself.  She said: “He’s not a guru at all. He told me in person he wasn’t an expert in child protection. I don’t know why he keeps getting chosen. His recommendations from the Climbie inquiry have caused absolute mayhem out there for social workers.”

SPRINKLE IN SOME SOUNDBITES:  You said yesterday that ”keeping children safe is everyone’s responsibility. It is not just the job of social workers or the government. Enabling members of the public to be part of the local safeguarding children boards will mean that child protection arrangements will no longer be behind closed doors.”  Actually, I would have thought keeping child protection issues behind closed doors is a bloody good idea, what with confidentiality and sensitivity being key to everything that social workers do.  And since when is keeping children safe my responsibility? Sure, if/when I have children I will try to keep them safe but surely that job falls to every individual parent? So much for parental responsibility. You even had the nerve to say that a key aim of these changes was to support and train social workers to make decisions without feeling someone “breathing down their neck”, which is precisely the culture that Labour have pushed into every corner of the public sector.

You see Ed, this latest impending policy failure would be amusing if it wasn’t so sad.  Even when it comes to child protection, your arrogance blinds you as to the true cause of the problems: the Labour Party.  You have robbed these professionals of their dignity, their accountability, their self-respect, their autonomy and their commitment to their work.  The above list of Labour solutions can be applied to almost every single area of policymaking, be it public sector or elsewhere, which is deeply disturbing.  There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to solving society’s problems, but the blinkered, simplistic and genuinely naive view of socialists like yourself will always prevent you from understanding that.

Yours sincerely,

A.Tory