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Child Protection

I share the hon. Gentleman's concern, and I shall talk about serious case reviews shortly. I noticed that my office got an urgent call from the Secretary of State's office to rush out that answer, which I think the hon. Gentleman was expecting. In Doncaster, there were again chilling echoes of what happened in Haringey and elsewhere. The published executive summaries of the serious case reviews in Doncaster spoke of missed opportunities—and in any case, in November Ofsted found that 41 per cent. of those serious case reviews were inadequate. Children met their deaths as a result not of one-off violent incidents but of systematic violence. The case of child A involved grossly inadequate responses by social services. Social work departments were in chaos, suffering from unmanageable workloads and not engaging remotely satisfactorily with vulnerable families. Health services had failed to take proper precautions and liaise with other agencies—a fundamental weakness identified in the case of Victoria Climbié and repeatedly since. Similar common themes have come out in other high-profile cases in Birmingham and Huddersfield that have hit the headlines—and, I fear, will come out in many other cases elsewhere that are still to work their way through the system. We will never prevent all such tragedies in the future. Evil human beings will continue to commit unimaginably evil acts, even against their own kin. However, it is the job of child protection services to reduce the opportunities, to be vigilant concerning the likely candidates, and to intervene in a timely and appropriate manner whenever possible. So how on earth is this still happening, and what must take place to reduce such tragedies in the future? On one level, of course, we are being denied the vital opportunity to find out, to learn from the lessons and to implement the solutions, because we rarely get to see the full serious case reviews of such tragedies. Worse than that, Ofsted reports have thrown significant doubt on the integrity, thoroughness and value of many of the unpublished reviews. Even executive summaries are not necessarily published in full, let alone an accurate picture of the detailed underlying review. In the case of baby P, the Secretary of State said that he had taken advice from the Information Commissioner that advised against the publication of the serious case review. That turned out to be news to the Information Commissioner. Instead, my hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State and three other privileged hon. Members were allowed a furtive sight of the report behind locked doors, without pen and paper, and were sworn to secrecy. As David Hencke put it in The Guardian,"““how could we know that these summaries are perfect—except to rely on””" the Secretary of State's"““words—and that even if all reports under””" the Secretary of State"““are perfect, how can we be sure that under a future children's secretary they won't lapse into previous bad ways...The public and the profession deserve better than this. It is no wonder that similar cases to Baby P happen with monotonous regularity. It also seems to make a mockery of Lord Laming's good work if the professionals, let alone the public, do not get unfettered access to these reports. The fact that reports could be published could sharpen up future case reviews.””"