Education Committee
Oral evidence: Children's Services and the murders of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson, HC 413
Tuesday 28 June 2022
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 28 June 2022.
Members present: Robert Halfon (Chair); Miriam Cates; Anna Firth; Tom Hunt; Dr Caroline Johnson; Kim Johnson; Ian Mearns; Angela Richardson.
Questions 1 - 118
Witnesses
I: Annie Hudson, Chair of the Child Safeguarding Practice Review.
II: Marium Haque, Interim Strategic Director of Children’s Services, Bradford Council; Kersten England, Chief Executive, Bradford Council; Tim Browne, Interim Director of Children’s Services, Solihull Council; and Nick Page, Chief Executive, Solihull Council.
Written evidence from witnesses:
– [Add names of witnesses and hyperlink to submissions]
Witness: Annie Hudson.
Q1 Chair: Today’s session is on the tragic murders of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson. Some of the issues we will discuss today will be very distressing and upsetting. If you have any immediate concerns about the safety or wellbeing of any child, please contact the police, and if anyone else is upset about the content today, please contact the NSPCC Childline or Samaritan helplines.
For the benefit of the tape and those watching today on parliamentary television, can you introduce yourself and your title, please?
Annie Hudson: Good morning. My name is Annie Hudson. I am chair of the National Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel.
Q2 Chair: Due to poor staffing and lack of oversight, pivotal moments to save Arthur and Star were missed. In the case of Star, your report found that Frankie, Star’s mother, received no antenatal visit. Such a visit could have allowed professionals a chance to better understand and engage with Star’s parents. However, authorities told your review that high caseloads had led to a strain in delivery, resulting in Frankie not receiving an appointment.
Similarly, moments were missed to support Arthur. The school tried to refer Arthur for mental health support three times, and when he was finally seen he was discharged because it appeared that his anxiety was getting better. When Arthur was supposed to return to school in his final days, attendance was not mandatory, so no alarm was raised when Arthur’s father reported that he was staying off due to illness and his partner’s birthday celebrations.
These children became invisible to the professionals who could have stepped in at crucial moments to save them. These are issues of national significance. Only 9% of health visitors in England work with the recommended ratio of 250 children or less, and since the pandemic we have seen mental health referrals spiral out of control and CAMHS bouncing serious mental health problems back to schools. We know that the number of ghost children, which is an awful phrase, has passed 100,000.
How optimistic are you that the changes outlined in your report can make a meaningful difference, if these underlying issues are not addressed in full? All the way through, can you be as concise as possible, because there is a lot to go through?
Annie Hudson: I think the issues you flagged up about early antenatal support to Star’s mother, and similarly around mental health support for Arthur, highlight how protecting children is very much a multiagency endeavour, and it is important to have strong and good early help services in place. Josh MacAlister’s recently published care review addresses some of those issues and makes some important proposals and recommendations to Government.
Additionally, in relation to both Star and Arthur, as well as those moments and opportunities at an earlier stage, as our report outlines, there were a number of very critical opportunities when higher natured concerns about possible bruising and injury surfaced, and our report looks at those issues in great detail.
Our recommendations—we purposely decided not to come up with scores of recommendations—are designed explicitly to strengthen the child protection system nationally, but also locally. I am happy to talk about those recommendations in more detail.
Q3 Chair: Thank you. We will come on to some of those. If I can ask about the families’ concerns, throughout both the cases of Arthur and Star, wider family members tried to alert professionals about the risks they thought that Arthur and Star were being exposed to at home. Arthur’s wider family raised concerns that they were not sure that Arthur’s father, Thomas, would protect Arthur, yet despite this evidence Thomas Hughes continued to be seen as a protective father. Similarly, Star’s great-grandma was concerned about how Savannah, Star’s mother’s partner, was treating Star. She reported this to social care, but, as the report says, this was dismissed as a malicious referral when a social worker was told that her great-grandmother did not approve of same sex relationships.
After reading the report, Star’s family has said how frustrated they are. They believe that the authorities did not hear their side of what was going on, and your report says that local authorities should work more closely with wider family members and not rely predominantly on the voice of parents. How do you make sure that the voice of wider family members is listened to, going forward?
Annie Hudson: Yes, this issue about family concerns being taken seriously was a very powerful theme across what happened to both Star and Arthur. Both of those children had very different experiences, and what happened to them was in very different contexts and parts of the country, but probably the most common theme was in relation to the way family concerns were not listened to, not followed up and generally disregarded.
What we say in our report is that at several very critical points in relation to both children, there should have been much more heed taken of those concerns. Concerns were repeated over a period of time in relation to both children; it was not just one occasion when families presented concerns. It highlighted for us how very important it is, when considering and investigating allegations, for professional social workers, police and health professionals to look critically at the way in which they may have certain biases, or they may be making certain assumptions. I think what we felt in both cases was that certain assumptions were made. With Arthur, as you have just said, there was an assumption that his father would be a protective factor, and similarly with Star there was a framing of family concerns as being malicious, because that is what the child’s parents and the parent’s partner were saying—that these were malicious because family members did not approve of their same sex relationship. Instead, what should have happened was getting behind that and taking those concerns seriously.
It is one of the things that we have said to all safeguarding partners in our report—that all safeguarding partners must make sure that at a local level, concerns from families are taken very seriously and followed through. I think the notion of malicious referrals is quite problematic, because it can mean that people frame things and do not look more widely and more deeply at what may be happening to a child.
Q4 Chair: Thank you. Your review suggests that there are two important factors that need to change to improve child protection: multiagency arrangements for protecting children are more fractured and fragmented than they should be, and there has been insufficient attention to and investment in securing specialist multiagency expertise required for undertaking investigations and responses to significant harm from abuse and neglect. Uou pulled together all the key events where the opportunities to work across multiple agencies and better support Arthur and Star were missed. You make it clear that while the concept of partnership working is embedded and enshrined in statutory guidance, multiagency working is not operating properly in practice. I have seen this in my own constituency in terms of domestic abuse. Lord Laming’s review into the death of Victoria Climbié highlighted that many professionals would have done things differently if only they had known. Why is it so difficult to get statutory partners to work together to see issues of child protection in the round? Are there any areas in England that have cracked it with respect to multiagency working and offering best practice?
Annie Hudson: The first thing to say is that our recommendations for the multiagency child protection units were based in part on our analysis of what happened to Star and to Arthur, but it is also to do with our wider perspective. We have about 500 cases—instances—where children have suffered serious harm every year. The evidence base we have is not just these two children, but a much wider evidence base. From that, we can certainly say that in very many instances, the child protection system works well for children and the right action is taken at the right time. I think that is part of the context for this discussion.
There are instances, as we saw here, where agencies operate in a silo and there is fractured and fragmented decision-making, which is absolutely not in the best interests of children. That is why we are suggesting that at those very crucial moments when there are concerns being expressed about the child’s welfare and safety, the work and the response should be undertaken by one integrated team, bringing together the relevant professionals, police, health, social workers, adult mental health, and so on. Only then, if you have one team—the analogy that we have used in other places is youth offending services, where you have a multi-professional team—do you then reduce the likelihood of information falling through the cracks, as I think happened. In terms of the story of Arthur and the evidence about photographs of injuries—there were similar issues with Star—you can see that if you have one team undertaking those investigations who have those specialist forensic inquiry skills, as well as skills in working with families and talking to children, you are giving the practitioners undertaking this extremely difficult work the conditions that make better practice more possible and consistent. Protecting children is complex, challenging and never easy.
Q5 Chair: How much do you think the drift towards safeguarding over child protection has had an impact on the cases of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson?
Annie Hudson: That is an interesting question. The concept of safeguarding is a much broader concept, and it has brought into the frame thinking about safeguarding on school trips, sports safety and that kind of thing. What we are talking about here is protecting children who are at risk of significant harm. It is important that we name child protection for what it is when we talk about that group of children. There are about 50,000 children in the country who are on a child protection plan at any one time, so that is quite a significant group of children, but it is a relatively small proportion of the broader group of children in need. We really need to focus and be clear about the very particular skills, aptitudes and values that you need to bring to that work.
Q6 Chair: One of the most radical recommendations in your report is to create multiagency child protection units. What new powers would these multiagency child protection units have? How would they better ensure multiagency working and how would they differ from the so-called MASH, or multiagency support hub teams?
Annie Hudson: The key difference between the MASH and these units is that the MASH operates as the front door. In fact, in some places it is called the front door. I believe in Bradford they call it the integrated front door, so that is the front door for all referrals into children’s social care, where there is a triaging of response and bringing information from other agencies, education, police, health and so on.
The child protection unit function would only start when there was a concern that a child might be at significant harm—if you think about Star and Arthur, those moments when concerns about their safety were being expressed. In our view, and this is the recommendation we have made to Government, their function would be about undertaking the strategy meetings. You will see in the report that we were quite critical of the number of times when a strategy meeting should have been held, when the planning of an investigation between the three statutory partners would have been undertaken—thinking about how you tell families, what you talk to them about and so on—and then through to investigation and decisions about children being on child protection plans, and at what point they might need to come off the plan. It is throughout that concentrated work around protecting children, until such point as they are deemed to be safe and they do not need to be on a plan, or, for example, a decision might be taken to initiate care proceedings.
Q7 Chair: Arthur’s cousin, Ms Dixon, said she appreciates the recommendations in your report, but she has voiced concerns over how long it is going to take to bring these changes. She says, “I am worried about the training and setting up of the system and how many children are at risk while we wait for that.” What changes can be made in the short term to better protect children at risk of abuse? Can you comment on the petition introduced by Arthur’s family for social workers to wear body-worn cameras to help professionals spot unseen dangers to the child and changes in the child’s appearance? His family has argued that the home visit is the most crucial time to save a child in danger and that this change would be quick to enact, because social workers could put them on from “this morning”. That petition now has 4,000 signatures, so should the Government introduce body-worn cameras for social workers?
Annie Hudson: In terms of the concern of Star’s cousin, which I absolutely understand and appreciate, one of the things that is perhaps important to remember is that the panel who undertook this review, which I chair, is a standing body, so we are not going away and we will do all that we can within our power to ensure that these recommendations are enacted. That is important.
Secondly, the Secretary of State has announced the establishment of a cross-government ministerial group, and I think that is an important change. One of the things that we have concluded as part of this review is that there is not enough linkage across government and shared leadership across all the different Government Departments. This is not just the province of the Department for Education, as you will appreciate. I know that along with the recommendations from the care review, the Government will publish their response by the end of the year, so that is important and positive.
We have also given advice to all safeguarding partners across the country around some very critical things that they need to do immediately, including those issues that you raised about family concerns, but also responses to concerns about children being bruised, which was an important issue here. We will keep an eye on that and see how effectively those issues are being addressed by safeguarding partners through our daily work.
We have thought about the issue about body cameras, and it is complicated. We believe that the most important thing is the work to be done in strengthening child protection and bringing agencies closer together. The aspirations of the 2017 legislation around joint accountability across the safeguarding partners is important, but it needs to be realised much more powerfully.
Q8 Chair: Do you agree with what they say? Should they introduce body-worn cameras for social workers?
Annie Hudson: Personally, I am not convinced that that is the key lever.
Q9 Chair: It could be one important thing, along with many others. The other things that you are talking about are absolutely right, but why not do both?
Annie Hudson: There could be risks with body cameras, in terms of impact on children and relationships with families, that we would need to think about very carefully. I certainly, at this point, find it difficult to support wholeheartedly, but I understand the sentiment and the reasoning behind that.
Q10 Chair: Finally for now, it is clear that despite the significance of these horrific deaths and the abuse suffered by Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson, both Solihull and Bradford Council have been slow to change. Your report found that many of the issues featured in both cases had been previously noted in various inspection reports published before Arthur and Star came to the attention of social services. In the last two Ofsted inspections of children’s services, Solihull had been rated “requires improvement”. The most recent inspection found that Solihull closed cases without sufficient information. Similarly, Bradford has been rated inadequate by Ofsted since 2018. Issues found in Ofsted monitoring reports were echoed in Star’s case, such as premature case closures and a lack of professional curiosity to test out parental self-reporting. The major faults surrounding child protection in Solihull and Bradford are not new. They have been pointed out time and again, yet the pace of change and improvement has been tortoise-like. How confident are you that your recommendations will be enacted at a local level?
I ask this because Bradford has also not seen a significant improvement in provision following Star’s murder. In his report to the Secretary of State earlier this year, the Children’s Services Commissioner, Steve Walker, said that the pace of improvements in Bradford is slow. Four years after Ofsted’s damning inspection report, Bradford’s children’s services still does not have permanent senior leadership. Following Arthur’s murder, safeguarding partners in Solihull conducted a rapid review in July 2020. This review highlighted several learning points and actions, yet several of these actions have not been taken, two years on. Two years after the tragic death of Arthur, Solihull has been issued with an improvement notice following concerns around serious weakness.
Given what went on, and the record of these councils in failing inspections, and yet still not following through, you would think that they would have turned their council into a Rolls-Royce service on these issues. Is the pace of change and improvement too slow, and what could be done about it? How sure are you that your recommendations will be enacted at a local level?
Annie Hudson: Yes, leadership is absolutely critical and having stable leadership, as we know not just from Bradford and Solihull, is crucial. We know that from other places, and the points that you are making in highlighting some of the historical issues are important.
The process of working with Bradford and Solihull and the partners—it is important to remember that this is about the three statutory agencies and their joint and shared responsibility—is that we had very constructive and open conversations and dialogue with people throughout the organisation: practitioners, managers, leaders, political and professional. I think it has been a difficult process, inevitably. The work of unpacking what happened around these two children and how it reflected, in some respects, wider problems has been very difficult and challenging for them. The decision that Bradford has made with the Department for Education to establish a children’s trust provides an opportunity that I am confident they will take and are taking.
Q11 Chair: I am worried that you are being too easy on these councils, given what occurred and the failures that I have mentioned post these tragedies. I am concerned that you are not tougher on these two councils to get their act together.
Annie Hudson: We have been very clear and explicit in the report about the problems with leadership across the system and about how that leadership was not creating the conditions in which the right and strong practice could occur. We have made very clear recommendations about how in both places, in different ways, they need to strengthen the leadership across the partnership. It will be for the Department for Education, with others, including the commissioner in Bradford and the improvement adviser, to hold Bradford and Solihull respectively to account for those changes.
Q12 Dr Caroline Johnson: I should mention my entry on the register of interests. I am a consultant paediatrician, so health and child protection work is part of that role.
I want to ask you about the child protection plans. The child protection plans are supposed to identify and provide intensive support for children most at risk of harm, yet there were 536 serious incidents reported in the year to March 2021. Only one in 10 of those children were on such a plan, and neither of the children we are talking about today were. Do you think the process of putting certain children on a plan is fit for purpose, given that it fails to identify the vast majority of children who come to serious harm?
Annie Hudson: You are right that a relatively small number are on a plan, and a slightly larger number are known to children’s social care, but there is also a significant number who are not known to any of the more specialist services and just known to universal services. The annual report sets that out, and there is information in this report.
Clearly, following the Baby Peter Connelly issues in 2008 and 2009, there was a great increase nationally in the numbers of children on plans, and we are still seeing quite significant increases in the number of section 47 investigations. I think about one third of those tend to lead to children being on a child protection plan.
What we must be careful about is not drowning ourselves in the numbers. Clearly, the truly critical issue is about making sure that the right children are the focus of investigations and of plans. These two children were not the subject of an investigation, and they were not on child protection plans, when we now can see that they should have certainly been the subject of child protection investigations. We are clear about that in the report.
Going to your question, I do not think that it is the process that is problematic. I think what we see is too much inconsistency in the quality of decision-making and risk assessment and the quality of information sharing between agencies. An accurate sense of a risk to a child at any one point in time is not consistently strong, so we see some good assessments, where people are working together well, but other times when there has been that fracturing of decision-making. That is so important, because you must act very swiftly and decisively when you are talking about children at risk of harm in their families.
Q13 Dr Caroline Johnson: Yes, but one of the problems is that you talk about joint decision-making and joint accountability. The fact is that while lots of people are responsible for a decision, no one person is. That leads to poor decision-making, because you get groupthink. One of the things that concerns me particularly reading the report about Arthur was that nobody looked into these bruises. One of the basic things I was taught as a paediatrician was that lots of children get lots of bruises—we all know that as parents—on their shins and on bony prominences, but we know that bruises in places like the ears, the soft spaces, the back and the genitals, are much more significant. Yet the social worker who went to look at bruises on this little boy’s back then did nothing about them. That is very concerning. Why was there no child protection medical? Who is being held to account for the fact that there was no child protection medical done when there clearly should have been?
More than that, why was there such a discrepancy between the photographs of Arthur’s back, which apparently show more extensive and severe bruising, and the description from the social worker who went to visit of a bit of faded bruising? The medical evidence given suggests that they are not compatible pieces of information. Who is being held to account for why this little boy was not properly investigated, why a medical professional was not asked to comment on whether he had an organic cause for these bruises and whether they were compatible with the playfighting that was described? It seems to me that that is a key step in the life of this boy that could have prevented his death.
Annie Hudson: I completely agree with you, and we are very clear about that. There were a number of moments—not just the visit, but a number of critical moments—when the police and the local authority did not look at the whole picture, did not interrogate what was happening and talk to, as you quite rightly say, the paediatricians about the bruising. I think you will recall that we were quite critical of the fact that when the photographs did arrive in the local authority’s office, there was not a decision at that point to talk to a paediatrician and ask them to look at the photographs.
You are absolutely right that there was a failure to involve medical experts at a number of points in relation to Arthur. What we say very firmly, and have said to all safeguarding partners, is that they need to ensure they have very clear protocols and understood practice across all agencies about the kinds of bruising to be worried about and what actions need to be taken.
Q14 Dr Caroline Johnson: Is this not standard practice? I have been a paediatrician and working in paediatrics since 2002; that is 20 years. At no point in that time has anyone suggested that bruises on the back are common or caused by playfighting. They do happen, but in a case where a grandparent is raising specific concerns suggesting that these may have been caused by abuse, and the bruising is as severe and extensive as you describe, surely it has always been the case that those children should be sent for a child protection medical. This is not new or revolutionary but standard, basic practice. Why was standard practice not followed? Given that it was not followed, why is no one being held to account for their failure to do the right thing in this case?
Annie Hudson: In terms of holding to account, you may want to ask colleagues from Bradford or Solihull about that. I absolutely agree with you that there were some very basic understandings about bruising and where bruising occurred that was not heeded. It is important that social workers and police officers have that basic knowledge and understanding about bruising and understand that when there are concerns about bruising in particular parts of the body, they immediately consult. That is the whole point of having a strategy meeting. Many years ago, when I was a team manager undertaking a lot of child protection investigations, we would sit down with the paediatrician and the police sergeant and plan the investigation and look at the evidence we had. We would look at what other evidence or information we might need before we go to talk to a child, and that includes—
Dr Caroline Johnson: It happens?
Annie Hudson: Yes, it still happens in many instances, but it was a failure that it did not happen here, and we are very clear about that.
Q15 Dr Caroline Johnson: My other question was about prejudice. We have seen in Rochdale and other places how professionals’ fear of being labelled as prejudiced led to the lack or failure to protect children. We have seen in the case of Star Hobson in your report the suggestion that perhaps staff may have been concerned that they would be labelled as prejudiced for going after the person who subsequently murdered Star, because of the suggestion that the grandparents were prejudiced against a same-sex relationship. How do we ensure that staff are not so concerned about being labelled as prejudiced themselves, so that they do not fail to protect children?
Annie Hudson: That is an important point and one of the reasons why we are proposing the multiagency child protection unit, notwithstanding your important points about groupthink. We believe that if you have the key professionals working together in one team and working in a culture where it is right and good and healthy to challenge one another about people’s assumptions, you are much more likely to get behind, for example, what was happening with Star. Star’s mother was saying that it was malicious because they did not approve of the same-sex relationship, but if you have a more challenging, critical working environment people would say, “Hold on a minute. Is there something else going on here? Are we being deflected by this idea that it is a malicious prejudicial view from the families? Is there something else going on?”
Q16 Dr Caroline Johnson: How does that differ from what we have at the moment with the designated named doctors for child protection within the hospital, the designated doctors in the region and the various multiagency meetings and case conferences? How does that differ from the processes that are already there, and how do you prevent the deskilling of the general members of staff if everything is just, “I don’t know. Refer it on”?
Annie Hudson: I think that will be a challenge going forward, and it is something that needs to be addressed, to make sure that everybody has a sense of their clear responsibilities and accountabilities around child protection, whether that is a nurse working on a paediatric ward, a GP, a teacher or a social worker working with, for example, children with disabilities. Everybody needs to be mindful of those responsibilities, but what we are saying is that when it comes to investigating child protection allegations, as was required here, you need very specialist skills, forensic skills of investigation. You would bring together in that team—not necessarily all on a full-time basis—paediatricians, specialist police officers, specialist social workers, adult mental health workers and access to adult mental health psychiatry as you needed. You would have much more of a sense of one service, one team, rather than what happens now where you rely on people to contact others and to come to the table for discussion. This is about having a discrete, integrated team where we think that the quality of decision-making and the ability to be decisive in a timely way would be much increased from what happens currently.
Time can be lost just because getting hold of somebody, getting people to a meeting and all those things are much more difficult, whereas if you are all together in one team, your ability to make good quality, timely and decisive decisions is much enhanced, in our view.
Q17 Tom Hunt: I guess this is also a question to do with that visit that happened with Arthur to do with the bruises on the back. There was obviously a discrepancy about the way the bruises were analysed, but a big job of a social worker should be to analyse behaviour, pick up on body language and read between the lines when it comes to the way that people interact with each other. It concerns me how dramatically wrong the assessment of the social worker was. My understanding is that after that visit, they came away saying that Arthur was very happy and very safe. This was not a conclusion that it was only marginal—“It is not great”—but, “Very happy, very safe”. I know that we are dealing today with two great tragedies where things went badly wrong and grave errors were made, and every day there will be social workers who make correct calls and do things in the right way. But do you think generally, at the national level, when it comes to the training of social workers, there is sufficient focus on things such as behavioural science and things that I would have assumed would be at the forefront and central to the role of a social worker?
Annie Hudson: You are right that good social work requires the ability to be analytical and critical, and of course to build and use relationships with families, parents and children well, and to use their authority well, knowing when they need to be more challenging and so on. I entirely concur with your views about what is needed.
There are several things. I think the quality of social work training is probably another discussion. It does vary. There is some good social work training and there are some excellent people coming off social work programmes now, but it probably is variable. I would certainly say personally that teaching and learning around using those analytical skills and working in situations where families are not going to co-operate—for reasons that make sense, some people struggle with that—is the first thing.
The second thing is that we know—this was particularly an issue in Bradford—that in many parts of the country there has been too much reliance on agency social workers. Agency social workers can be good, but as happened in one instance during the work with Star, a social worker who was an agency worker left with one week’s notice. The assessment was unfinished, and that had very problematic consequences.
There is an issue about capacity in the system. There is also an issue, which we have talked about here, where people are sometimes under so much pressure that they do not get the opportunities for the reflective, challenging supervision that they need. These are difficult tasks, and they require people to be well and supportively managed, but also in a way where they are able to think through what they have seen on a visit, what it is telling them and what they need to do next, rather than rushing from visit to visit without that chance to percolate the thinking and assessments.
There are some major issues there, which are picked up well and very clearly in Josh MacAlister’s report. He makes some very radical and important proposals about changes to how the social work career pathway is managed so that it would be more similar to what happens to teachers, doctors and police officers. There is not that clear career pathway, and I think that has been a real problem to date.
Q18 Anna Firth: I would like to start at page 7, paragraph 5 of your report—the “Child Protection in England” national review into the murders of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson, 2022, for the broadcast. The paragraph there says, “It is also very important to acknowledge that Arthur and Star both died during the COVID-19 pandemic. We have therefore sought to understand, as far as it is possible, whether the circumstances of this global crisis affected Arthur and Star, their families and the response of professionals to what was happening in their lives.” What is missing there is the very obvious point that Arthur, in particular, was not in school during this period. Arthur normally would have been in school during those months, and teachers would have seen him every day, in a way that social workers would not have done; that would have been impossible. To that extent, Arthur was hidden from sight. Do you agree with me that there is much more chance that Arthur’s death could have been prevented if he had been at school during this critical period?
Annie Hudson: There is no doubt, and we say this very explicitly, that school is a protective factor for children, particularly for vulnerable children, because it is the eyes and ears on children, particularly in a primary school. I visited, and I know that they take very seriously the children’s emotional welfare. There is no doubt that if children are going to school, they are much less likely to be hidden from sight. That is not to say, of course, that some of what happened to Arthur might not have happened, and it is difficult to know what the impact would have been if he had been going to school, but there would have been those extra eyes and ears, without any question. I do not think we can say, because of what we know with Arthur, for sure that it would have prevented. I do not think we can say that.
Q19 Anna Firth: Absolutely not, which is why I used the words “much more likely” that it could have been prevented. We are the Education Select Committee, so would you agree with me that complete school closures of this type should never happen again?
Annie Hudson: I certainly think that vulnerable children—and Arthur, in a way, was sadly a child who was not deemed to need to go to school because he did not have parents who were key workers and he was not on an education healthcare plan or a child in need plan, so he was not part of that group. For children like Arthur, school closure is very problematic, without any question. Without getting into a categorical statement about any future events, if there were such a time again, there must be proper attention given to keeping children in sight.
Q20 Anna Firth: I am using my words very carefully because I understand that there is no black and white in these situations, so that is why I say: would you agree that “complete” school closures should never happen again?
Annie Hudson: Yes. I certainly agree that complete school closures are problematic for children who are vulnerable.
Q21 Anna Firth: Thank you. The next point that I want to come on to is the issue of these stepparents and parents, who it is clear from your report were highly manipulative individuals. How can you ensure that the staff involved with these families have the training to ensure that they do not have the wool pulled over their eyes by manipulative operators such as these? There is no way that one can escape the feeling, from reading the report, that the authorities dealing with these two cases on the ground were naive. What changes are you putting in place so that we can feel sure that the people on the ground interacting with these highly manipulative individuals are not themselves manipulated?
Annie Hudson: That is a central issue in all child protection work, for police officers, social workers, paediatricians and so on. That is why it comes back to the primary recommendation about child protection units, where you have those different professional colleagues working in a situation where there is a culture of it being okay and demanded of them that they challenge themselves, and that they constantly look behind what may be presented at face value. Sometimes—I think in both these instances—people come across as very plausible. Of course, in child protection work you must be forever sceptical, and that is sometimes difficult because you must hold that scepticism alongside also wanting to work with families, with parents, with children. That is always a very difficult balance, being there in a caring, helpful role but simultaneously having complete focus on the priority of protecting children.
In terms of how I can ensure that does not happen again, I do not think that is within my power, but the combination of the proposals that are in Josh MacAlister’s report about social worker training, together with the proposals around strengthening safeguarding partnerships and making sure that they have a strong and clear line of sight on the quality of practice in their areas and at a national level in a way that we have not had for some time now, and much stronger performance focus on the quality of practice, are some of the critical levers for the future to reduce the likelihood of some of these incidents occurring again.
Chair: You have been brilliantly concise, but if you can carry on being as concise as possible, it is appreciated.
Q22 Anna Firth: I have one last point. Your second main point that you say needs to change is essentially more investment in securing the specialist multiagency expertise required to undertake these investigations, but in this case—I am talking particularly about the case of Arthur—there was bruising that was missed.
Annie Hudson: Yes.
Anna Firth: That is not an issue of expertise, is it? That is a question of people on the ground not seeing things that were either in front of their eyes or should have been in front of their eyes.
Annie Hudson: I understand your question, but we have in some respects, certainly in some parts of the country, a lot of different players undertaking investigations of child protection—lots of different social workers and police officers—and what we are saying is that we need to concentrate and develop that expertise around investigating. It is not always as straightforward as it may seem, particularly when we look back. It is slightly different scenarios, but with Arthur we saw that there were police taking actions and seeing certain kinds of evidence, and social workers doing the same, and we did not get that shared collective picture of what was happening involving paediatricians, as we know, making the assessment about the possible causation of those bruises. I understand that you feel, as we do, that these things should not have been missed and that they should have been addressed in a very different way.
Q23 Miriam Cates: The review acknowledges that the experiences of Star and Arthur were not unusual, sadly, when considered against other safeguarding incidents. I think you said you have around 500 cases currently on your books. What do you think is the cause of the increase in the number of these incidents? I assume that it is an absolute increase rather than an increase in reporting. Why do you think that cases of this type are increasing?
Annie Hudson: I am not sure we know that there has been that kind of increase. The 500 or so a year reflect the serious incidents that local authorities report to the DfE, Ofsted and to us, which usually will result in some kind of a local review, all of which we see and consider and give feedback about. From that evidence, we also look at patterns and trends.
There is more detail in our annual report and in the review. You will see that some of that is children who have been harmed as a consequence of extra-familial harm, sometimes maybe issues around sexual abuse in families or sexual exploitation. There are many different instances of neglect, so there are many different kinds of serious incidents that get reported.
The evidence is that there was an increase in notifications in 2020. It was an increase on the previous year, but it was not that dissimilar to 2018. We are not sure—the numbers are relatively small—that we are seeing an exponential increase. What we also know is that the numbers of deaths by abuse and neglect in England are very comparable to other western European states.
Q24 Miriam Cates: Of those serious incidents where the child is harmed in the home, is there any difference in the number of those incidents involving children who only live with biological parents, compared to those who live with step-parents or other adults? Is there a difference in how safe those children are and how frequent the incidents are?
Annie Hudson: We do talk about it in a number of our reports, and I can certainly give you that. It depends on which age group. We published a report last year on non-accidental injury of children under one, where interestingly and importantly—the focus was on fathers and on stepfathers—it was mostly birth fathers. I think as children get older, the likelihood of abuse by step-parents or parents’ partners increases, particularly as families—
Miriam Cates: The likelihood of a child not living with both biological parents also increases over time.
Annie Hudson: Exactly that, so I would be a bit nervous about saying definitively that one kind of family structure is more at risk for some children than others. Clearly, when you are working with families—this was absolutely the case with these two children—you saw with Arthur his father had been and was seen to be a protective father, meeting his responsibilities well. Then, in a new relationship, things spiral and change very dramatically and speedily, putting the child—Arthur, in this case—at the most extraordinary risk, which resulted ultimately in his very tragic death. It is that bit that we need to understand: the dynamics in families and when things change in households, and what the impact of those changes are on children, because that is clearly what happened to Arthur, but also to Star.
Q25 Miriam Cates: Coming back to what some of my colleagues have said about this idea of malicious reporting, one of the problems was that social workers did not want to be associated with the prejudice that had been assumed about this relationship. I understand from my own casework in my surgeries that there are unfortunate incidents where people do make malicious reports, particularly about another parent when they want custody. How are social workers trained to sift deliberate malicious reports that might have no truth in them, which, sadly, probably do occur, and reports that are very much real and should not be treated as malicious?
Annie Hudson: It is about judgment, questioning and challenging. For me, what I think is more helpful is to talk about unsubstantiated allegations rather than malicious allegations. That was the problem, as we heard in relation to Star, and to some extent I think with Arthur, because Arthur’s father and his partner, Emma Tustin, said, “Oh, yes, that is because they don’t approve of this relationship”, so batting stuff away and distracting attention from the child. It is about interrogating what the basis, the evidence, is for any allegation, and asking “Why are you saying that?” In Arthur’s case, particularly, there were photographs of bruising and at a much earlier stage—well, it never really happened—those photographs that were held by different people in different agencies should have been interrogated. That is where, as we have already discussed, it should have involved a paediatrician in helping to make an assessment.
Q26 Dr Caroline Johnson: You have talked about how these bruises were missed, in your words, and how we need more expert panels. In my perception, the bruises were not missed; they were seen. They were photographed by a relative, and several relatives over several days pursued a number of different statutory agencies. One can only imagine the anguish and the fear they had worrying about their loved one and the fact that it came to be. Royal College guidance is clear that when they are photographed, the child should be examined. The process is very clear, that if a child has bruises that are suspicious, we already have people who are experts who can look at bruises. I have done these bumps and bruises clinics, as they are called, myself. We already have hospitals that children can be admitted to as an emergency to have these bruises examined. This happens every day. These bruises, in my view, were not missed; they were ignored. Is that not right?
Annie Hudson: I think that is a very fair and appropriate way of describing it. Evidence of bruising was shared at different times with different individuals and agencies. The interrogation of the cause of that, and the involvement of specialist medical practitioners in assessing it and understanding what could or could not have caused it, absolutely did not happen. That was a singular failure, without any question.
Q27 Dr Caroline Johnson: How does your proposal to create an expert panel make any difference? In practice, there were experts, and this little boy was not referred to them when he should have been. Creating a different one, whether it is better or not, is not going to help if no one asks them to look.
Chair: To add to that, when I asked you my question, I said that the school had referred Arthur for mental health treatment three times but was refused, and by the time he was seen, they said his anxiety was getting better. As Caroline said, the bruises had been recognised and there were problems being identified, yet they were not picked up by the relevant authorities.
Q28 Dr Caroline Johnson: If no one refers you to the expert panel to be looked at, making a different expert panel will make no difference, would it?
Annie Hudson: I have two points in response to those two questions. First, what we have said is that there was a very fragmented picture and understanding of Arthur in the round, in terms of his needs and the risks that he was suffering, and that is partly because of the batting back of the mental health referrals, and so on. On your important point about how a multiagency expert unit would have made a difference, I think it would have made a difference, in that at a very early stage, if there had been any concerns—because it came into the police first, as I recall, and then it went to the local authority. You are quite right that multiple times different relatives referred into children’s services and the police, and I absolutely understand and have huge sympathy for their frustration and great sadness that nothing was done.
Q29 Dr Caroline Johnson: Probably the best recommendation you could make would be to reiterate—not even state as new—that where there are concerns about bruising and a child has bruising, particularly when there are photographs taken by a relative, the child should in all circumstances be examined by a paediatrician in a child protection medical, as they should be already. If that had been done on this occasion, this little boy might still be alive.
Annie Hudson: Absolutely. There are specific recommendations about bruising and responses to bruising to both Bradford and Solihull, but we have also been very clear to all safeguarding partners across the country that they need to make sure that their local practice and their local knowledge and local understanding is absolutely as you have described.
That is the immediate response, but in a nutshell it would mean that there would not be that fragmenting and passing of information and photographs, in Arthur’s case—information, in Star’s case—around different agencies. It would be looked at through one team, who would then work out what the police role was, what the medical role was and what the local authority children’s social care role would be. You would have more decisiveness, more timeliness and, I believe, much better judgments and decisions as a consequence.
Q30 Kim Johnson: Good morning, Annie. The report identifies a number of recommendations—22 years after the death of Victoria Climbié and Every Child Matters, we have had a series of recommendations about how agencies should work together to ensure that children do not fall through the net. How assured are you that these recommendations will be implemented to ensure that these tragedies do not happen again? What response have you had from Bradford, Solihull and the Department for Education to those recommendations?
Annie Hudson: You are absolutely right. I met with Lord Laming, who did the Victoria Climbié inquiry, and it was interesting going back and looking at his recommendations and seeing what recommendations had gone forward, but also the ones that had not. It was partly that discussion—along with a lot of the other evidence and other discussions—that led us to say that we must go a step further this time in having multiagency child protection units. We can no longer go along with often working well together, but the potential for siloes and fragmentation across different agencies in the respective responsibilities. That was the real force for me and my panel colleagues about having an integrated team and unit.
The response from Bradford and Solihull is that they have—I am sure they will say this to you later on—accepted our recommendations. Certainly, in my discussions with their leaders, they have said that the proposal about an integrated team is really useful and helpful. You can ask them about that. We have had discussions with key stakeholders, local authorities, police and health about that recommendation. I think some people have questions about it and others feel that it is the right way forward. There is something different it; it is a different design for the system.
The response from Ministers and senior officials to the recommendations has been very positive, but obviously they are now looking at how they are going to respond to them, along with the care review recommendations. I think it is important and positive, as I have already said, that the cross-government ministerial group has been set up, because these proposals will only work if there is support from each of the relevant Government Departments as well as from all the professional organisations.
Q31 Kim Johnson: Your report also identifies insufficient investment. You mentioned a 21% reduction in funding, Annie, so I want to know what you believe is the impact of that, particularly in terms of workforce and the retention of experienced social workers, which has led to some of these key issues.
Annie Hudson: There were issues, as we have flagged up, in relation to some of those earlier prevention services, particularly in Bradford, that we think did have an impact on some of the earlier decisions around Star and her mother. The capacity issue is not just about having sufficient social workers. I think it is the overreliance on agency social workers, particularly in Bradford, which creates churn and change and means families do not have the consistency of relationship. I know that from my own experience of working in boroughs where there has been a high use of agency staff.
Therefore, I think it is about having the calibre, the capacity and the support for good social workers. That is where I think Josh MacAlister’s report is so very important. It is about caseloads. It is about good supervision. It is about suitable training and ongoing training. Those are absolutely crucial ingredients for social workers, but also for other professional groups.
Q32 Kim Johnson: You did not identify in your recommendations the need for increased resources and funding to enable these processes to take place. Is there a reason for that?
Annie Hudson: No, we didn’t. In terms of social work and early help, there are very strong recommendations in Josh MacAlister’s report. We work very closely with him, so we knew what was going to be coming in his report. He has made a very clear, strong recommendation about developing family help and support and has calculated some of the investment required, and we would support that.
Q33 Ian Mearns: We had Josh MacAlister in front of us a number of weeks ago. I think the broad thrust of an awful lot of what he was talking about was moving a significant amount of resources upstream to do that early intervention preventative work and identification of problems.
The trouble that local authorities will have—it is not just the two local authorities that we are talking about—is that while they are dealing with their current crisis levels, it is a question of how they withdraw funds from that and move them upstream to do the preventative work, without some sort of injection of additional resources from central government or hugely increasing people’s local council tax. That is a financial question, but it is an inherent conundrum, from a local authority’s perspective, in terms of actually getting the initial resource to be able to move it upstream.
Annie Hudson: Yes. As I recall, in Josh MacAlister’s report, he makes a very clear proposal about investment to enable some of that working upstream to happen. Our view, and my view as chair, is that that direction of travel is really important for children and for families, but you also need to make sure you have a strong child protection system response. They are two sides of the same coin.
The family help is about working with a much larger group of children—children who are vulnerable for all sorts of reasons—but you have to also keep a very clear and strong focus on that group of children who may be at risk of significant harm. It is on that group that our attention has been most focused in this review and generally in our work.
Q34 Ian Mearns: From your analysis of what has gone on in these two local authorities and the work that you do with lots and lots of other cases, would you say that there has been a general trend for the thresholds for intervention and investigation to actually go up?
Annie Hudson: Do you mean it is harder to get a referral? I think it is an interesting one. If you look at section 47 inquiries—that is when there is a concern that needs to be investigated—those went very, very high, particularly in the decade after the Peter Connelly case. I know that if you talk to schools, for example, or health visitors who are working in universal services, their complaint is often that it is very difficult to get a referral accepted by children’s social care.
That is why Josh’s proposals about getting a much more robust, effective family help response and system, which would be multiagency, is so important, so that families who need help get that help at an earlier point in time and, hopefully, most of those children’s needs do not escalate to the point where they need the much more specialist child protection response. You have to keep your eye on both. At the peril of everybody—including, most importantly, children—if you do not keep your eye on both parts of that kind of spectrum, there can be calamitous consequences.
Q35 Chair: Finally, before we close—we are running over time—in September 2020, a social worker visited Star, but the social worker had no prior knowledge of Star or her family. This is in your report. She left the social worker team a week after this visit, leaving Star’s assessment incomplete. How on earth could that happen and why is it so difficult to retain and recruit high quality social workers, especially in a circumstance like this where issues were known with the family? How could a social worker who has no prior knowledge at all go and visit?
Annie Hudson: I think what is meant by that is that they had not had previous contact, but a social worker before going—
Chair: No prior knowledge?
Annie Hudson: They should have access to the files and the information.
Chair: You would send a social worker who was experienced with what had been going on, rather than just someone who looked at a file and turns up.
Annie Hudson: What happened was, as I recall, that it was dealt with as a new referral. I also understand that that particular social worker was an agency social worker but they were quite an experienced social worker. This was not as it happened earlier on, I think, with Star where there was a relatively newly qualified social worker. What happened should not have happened. It was poor, weak practice, without any question, that the assessment was not finished.
I think it highlights at a general level the problems of overreliance on agency social workers, which was certainly the case for Bradford at that time, because you don’t get the consistency. You have people who can leave with one week’s notice, leaving the work and other cases in the air. It is also very expensive. Depending on how you measure it, agency social workers can cost at least 50% more than a permanently employed social worker, so you are using the resources you have in a very inefficient and uneconomical way. It was highly problematic and should not have happened in the way that it did.
Q36 Chair: Finally—this touches on Kim’s question in terms of what has happened in the past—God forbid, are we going to have someone like you or another individual doing yet another review of a tragedy that occurs with a young child in a few years’ time, or do you think what you have done is going to make a difference this time?
Annie Hudson: It would be inappropriate and entirely wrong of me to say that these tragedies don’t occur.
Chair: There will always be tragedies, but there seem to be so many of these things. Then there is a big review, and then very similar things happen in terms of neglect, failure by the authorities, failure by the multiagency workers, inexperienced social workers or whatever it may be. These things seem to be happening again and again, despite all the reviews, the commissions and the Government responses. Is this session just Groundhog Day, in essence?
Annie Hudson: I understand that. That was one of the things we set out as part of our mission on this review, which was to address some of the perennial themes that do crop up in many of the 500 reviews that we see every year, recognising that child protection is an extremely complicated, difficult public responsibility.
That is why we have proposed a significant shift and change—quite a radical change—in the design of how we undertake child protection work, because we think that making more recommendations for training or new procedures is not the right way forward. Instead, we need a national framework and a very different form of local delivery.
Chair: We know that there are tragedies almost every week with children in our country, but I hope very much that we don’t have to see someone like you again—I mean that in a very polite way—as a Committee Chair. Thank you for your service, thank you for what you have done and thank you for giving evidence. We have many more questions, understandably.
We are going to take a five-minute break, and I will ask the other witnesses to come and get ready.
Witnesses: Marium Haque, Kersten England, Tim Browne and Nick Page.
Q37 Chair: Thank you for coming today. For the benefit of the tape and those watching on Parliament television, could you please give me your names and titles? I will start with you on the left, please.
Tim Browne: Tim Browne, interim director of Children’s Services, Solihull Council.
Chair: Could I ask you all to speak loudly on the microphones?
Nick Page: Nick Page. I am the chief executive of Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council.
Marium Haque: Marium Haque, director of Children’s Services within Bradford Council.
Kersten England: I am Kersten England, chief executive at Bradford Council.
Q38 Chair: Thank you for attending today. The report published last month exposed the awful, shocking scale of abuse and neglect suffered by these two young children. A total of 130 bruises were found on Arthur’s body at the time of his death. Blood tests indicated that he could have been the victim of salt poisoning. In the days leading up to his murder, Arthur was forced to stand in the hallway alone for hours on end with no water.
Star was a victim of extensive physical abuse. The final cause of death was an abdominal haemorrhage caused by blunt force trauma. She had suffered 20 separate blows to the head and body over a period of two hours. Evidence suggests that she had also suffered a skull fracture and multiple injuries to the scalp, forehead, cheek and back in the months and weeks leading up to her murder.
The scale of abuse and torture suffered by these two young children is inconceivable. How was this allowed to happen on your watch, Mr Browne?
Tim Browne: Thank you, Chair. I joined Solihull after Arthur’s death and took over this role on an interim basis in June last year, and there are a number of issues that we have looked at and investigated as part of this case. One of the key issues for me, which Annie has already raised, is around the information sharing. There is a dispute around when the various photographs were taken and what the outcome of that was, but one of the fundamental issues for me was that there should have been a strategy discussion once they became apparent and once they were revealed. That was one of the biggest failings, from my perspective, and that might have resulted in some different actions.
Nick Page: This happened because we failed in our duty of care for Arthur across agencies. We did not share information between police, education, the court system and our health colleagues, and nobody held the ring in terms of building that jigsaw around Arthur’s life and the risk to Arthur’s life.
Q39 Chair: As I understand it, you have been the chief executive since 2014?
Nick Page: Yes.
Chair: You have had—I highlighted this in the previous session, as did my colleagues—previous inspections that showed that your children’s services were not providing a good service. Have you not thought of resigning?
Nick Page: I have been working for children and young people for 33 years. I started as a teacher in London. I have been a director of children’s services and I have turned around failing services. To be truthful with you, as Chairman of this Committee, not a day goes by when I don’t think, “Am I doing enough for children and young people, and the people I have the privilege to lead and serve?”
Professionally, we have three regulators. We have an improvement panel. We have DfE advisers. I have to report to the Minister and before you as a Committee. I visit other local authorities and speak to other chief executives to see whether I am missing things.
Chair: I am just asking you: did you not think it would be the right thing to do by accepting responsibility?
Nick Page: I did consider it, Chair, yes.
Chair: Why didn’t you resign?
Nick Page: Because of all the levels of accountability, I still believe I have the opportunity and the wherewithal to carry on improving the services for children and young people.
Q40 Chair: Even though there have been previous failing services and you are currently very slow to get the changes through, as I highlighted in the previous session, with this tragedy happening under your watch. It is not like you just turned up. You were there since 2014.
Nick Page: Yes.
Chair: Therefore, would it not have been the right thing to do, for the families, for you to take some responsibility and resign?
Nick Page: I take responsibility but, at this stage, I am not going to resign because of all the levels of accountability. The other thing, Chairman, is that I share that responsibility with the chief constable and, at the time, the chief executive of the clinical commissioning group. I accept that one of my social workers should have done better.
Q41 Chair: You are a failing council in terms of children’s services.
Nick Page: We are not a failing council in terms of—
Chair: I quoted to you the various inspections that said the things that you were failing on. I also, as I said, quoted things in the previous session to show that it is taking a long time for you to get your act together.
Nick Page: Thank you, Chairman. We require improvement; that is our Ofsted grade. We have had subsequent short inspections around child sex exploitation, around children that are being trafficked and around unaccompanied children. Each of those inspections has recognised that we are making improvements. Absolutely, at this stage, we have to make more improvements. I get that. We require improvement and we fully accept that.
Q42 Chair: The report concludes that professionals did not understand the full campaign of abuse that was unfolding at home for these two children. Despite many referrals to child protection agencies, neither was the subject of an ongoing child protection case at the time of death. How could these two children be suffering appalling abuse, despite having come to the attention of statutory services multiple times in their final weeks? I will start with you, Ms England, please.
Kersten England: I want to start, Chair, if I may, by expressing my deep sorrow at the death of Star. She should never have had to endure the horrific crimes and abuse to which she was subjected. I apologise now, unreservedly. We missed key signs that could have meant that we better protected her. I want to apologise now to the family of Star, to all those who loved her and to the wider community that cared for her, because their loss is devastating. I wanted to put that on the record first of all, Chair.
It is clear to me that we missed many things. There are three main areas that I would be really concerned about and are evident from the national panel report: that the assessments that we made of the circumstances in which Star was living were too positive and optimistic about the potential for her mother to care for her; that the mother and partner’s views were taken on face value and there was—you heard it in the previous session—insufficient probing; and that our social workers were distracted or dissuaded from probing further. It is clear that changes of social worker and insufficient management oversight played a part in this.
The second thing is that we did not build a full picture of what life was like for Star. She was born to a vulnerable young woman who had a difficult relationship with the father of the child and then with her partner. Star had multiple moves in her short life.
Chair: I want you to be concise. We have a lot to get through and I cannot just have you reading out long features.
Kersten England: Yes, I understand. My final point is simply to say—this is highlighted in the national panel report—that the multiagency response was insufficient. We did not share information and we could have held strategy meetings that might have allowed us to protect her more fully.
Chair: Concisely, please, Mr Page.
Nick Page: Yes. We took on face value Arthur’s father’s capability and care for him. We did not check that. The other key bit was that when Arthur’s school made referrals to our mental health colleagues, they were not followed up and, as my colleague Tim has described, we did not pull all the information together into that statutory meeting where all the agencies should have shared their information and built that jigsaw for Arthur.
Q43 Chair: Could I just come on to the families, please? Throughout these young children’s lives, the wider families tried to act as advocates for them, to warn professionals about the risk of abuse, and yet their concerns were not listened to. The child protection report states that too often Arthur’s and Star’s families’ concerns were “disregarded and not taken sufficiently seriously”. Both Arthur’s and Star’s families voiced understandable frustration when they read the report’s findings. Star’s great-grandfather has said that the way that the cases were run was pretty shambolic, and he expressed anger at learning that social workers closed the investigation into Star’s case a week before she passed. Arthur’s cousin said she believes Arthur was truly let down by all services involved.
Can you give a good reason why their concerns were dismissed? I will come to you, Tim Browne, and then Ms Haque.
Tim Browne: It is very clear that not enough weight was given to the wider family. I think that is a cultural piece, not just locally but also nationally. It is about shifting our focus away from those preconceived ideas, and not accepting the narrative given by those who are closest to the children but being much more challenging, robust and triangulating. It comes back to lots of disguised compliance, which we need to make sure that we are uncovering at all times. That is the critical bit for me, I think.
Marium Haque: First of all, I would also like to put on record my deepest sympathies to Star Hobson and her family.
Chair: Can you speak a bit louder, please?
Marium Haque: Yes; sorry. With regard to why concerns from the wider family were dismissed, from looking at the records I can understand and see very clearly that the way that the family was viewed was that they considered the issues that were raised as being malicious; and the way that Star’s mother and her partner presented was perceived to be, much the same as in the case with Arthur, disguised compliance. There was also a lack of understanding around the coercive relationship between Savannah Brockhill and Frankie Smith.
Q44 Chair: Can I just ask again about family and multiagency working? The report lays out pretty horrific detail about the many attempts made by the families of both children to raise alarm. Photographs—this was highlighted by my colleague in the previous session—of Arthur’s bruising should have been shared across child protection agencies. Yet it was left to the family to forward on the e-mails to MASH a week after first sending the photographs to the police. Star’s family tried to warn professionals about the risk of domestic abuse at home, but these concerns were not heeded. Instead, family members’ concerns were recorded as malicious and social workers closed the case looking at the risk to Star. Why was it left to Arthur’s and Star’s families to try to join the dots between the services that were supposed to protect these children?
Kersten England: I think, as Marium has pointed out, it is clear that our colleagues across police, health and the council took too much at face value from Frankie and, indeed, did not seek sufficient information initially about Savannah and Savannah’s background. When such information was sought, I don’t think it was considered fully and significantly and investigated as fully as it should have been. It is, of course—
Q45 Chair: Why didn’t the referral of serious harm get escalated to multiagency fora?
Kersten England: Marium, do you want to cover that?
Marium Haque: Yes. Initially, there was a medical that was undertaken. A child protection medical was undertaken, and the outcome of that medical was that the bruising that was seen was consistent with the information that was provided by Frankie, Star’s mother.
Kersten England: I think we would, however, conclude that if a strategy meeting had taken place in which all of the contextual information was shared, it is at least possible that there would have been a fuller picture derived and a different conclusion reached.
Q46 Chair: If I could just go to Solihull, on 16 April Arthur’s grandmother called Solihull’s emergency duty team concerned about bruises and scratches to Arthur’s body. Despite the emergency duty team referring it to the police, it was decided that police officers would not conduct a welfare visit because they had already seen Arthur briefly recently in response to a domestic abuse incident earlier in the week. The report says that the decision by the police officer not to visit on the evening of 16 April was not appropriate.
The rationale for not visiting on the evening of 16 April seemed to take more account of the reaction of the adults in the household rather than placing Arthur’s needs at the centre of decision-making. Is it acceptable practice in your council to not initiate police welfare checks when someone raises concerns about child injuries?
Tim Browne: No, it is not. We would always follow through robustly and appropriately. I think the issue here was that the police had seen Arthur the day before so their view, therefore, was that he was safe. The social worker and the family support worker had also visited as well to examine Arthur and look at his bruising. Again, there was some dispute about the timeline for the photographs and when they actually came through from the police to the child protection team.
Q47 Chair: The MASH team received information about the referral. The report makes clear that “Decision making in the MASH was not robust”. Rather than opening a joint investigation, the MASH team decided to conduct a single social work duty screening. That is despite the fact that relevant joint guidance in the region at the time stated that a joint investigation should take place where there is “any allegation of physical abuse to a child or a suspicious injury to a child, or inconsistent explanations or an admission about a non-accidental injury”. Why was this guidance ignored? Why did Arthur’s case not lead to a joint investigation?
Tim Browne: Putting it back into context, we were in the middle of the pandemic—it started—and there were certainly exceptions made to the regulations, but I would agree that there should have been a strategy discussion held in order to take that forward. I think that was the biggest single issue that contributed potentially to Arthur’s death. There is nothing to say that had that happened, the same outcome would not have occurred, but I am sure that it would certainly have reduced the possibility.
Q48 Chair: I will just ask some questions about leadership. Leadership comes up time and time again, and we know that good leadership is key to enabling thorough multiagency child protection. The report says that “common to both Bradford and Solihull was a weak ‘line of sight’ to frontline practice by Safeguarding Partners”. During the period in which key agencies were working with Star, local authority children’s services had “inexperienced leadership and management at all levels”, and in Solihull “The leadership of the partnership did not have a strong line of sight to frontline practice”. Why have permanent directors not yet been appointed to lead children’s services?
Nick Page: In Solihull we are today interviewing two candidates for the permanent role. We have been out to advert twice, and we cannot secure—we will see how we go today—the candidates to do this role. Having been a director of children’s services for seven years, before I took on the role in Solihull as chief executive, I think it is probably, in my humble opinion, one of the toughest roles to do because of the accountability lines and the risks that we have. It is not a job for the fainthearted.
Q49 Chair: Ms England, in 2018 Bradford’s children’s services was rated “inadequate” by Ofsted. The area was given an improvement notice by the Department for Education and an improvement adviser. Although some progress had happened, both Ofsted and the improvement adviser expressed ongoing concerns about the pace of change. Steve Walker, the Children’s Commissioner, in his recent review said that despite commitment from council leaders, improvement in children’s services in Bradford has been too slow. If I am not mistaken, you have been around since 2015.
Kersten England: Since 2015; that is correct, yes.
Chair: Given what has gone on, the tragedy that occurred, the problems and your Ofsted rating of “inadequate”, why did you not think of resigning? Why have you not resigned?
Kersten England: I have thought of resigning. I have considered my position frequently. I have reflected, as my colleague has, on all of the actions I took and things that could or could not have been done. I have reflected, and I take responsibility. This happened on my watch. I am deeply sorry for the fact that this happened on my watch.
Chair: But not enough to resign.
Kersten England: Taking responsibility is also about staying in position and taking responsibility for putting it right. I think if you reflect on the commissioner’s report and, indeed, what the chair of the national panel said, stability and leadership is also critical.
In the last four years I have worked through the resignation of two directors of children’s services and have had interim directors of children’s services in place as a result. Clearly, my colleague here is working very hard to ensure that—
Q50 Chair: What are you doing to stabilise children’s services and expedite service improvement? I am interested to know if you have made any estimates of how many children’s lives are being put at risk because of the tortoise speed of change in your council.
Kersten England: In terms of expediting, as the report says, having stability and experienced leadership at every level and good management oversight is critical. As with our colleagues in Solihull, there is an advert live right now for recruitment to both the director of children’s services and the chief executive of the children’s trust, which we are in the process of forming. We are recruiting for the director of social care within that. This week there will be interviews for head of service positions. We have on this occasion secured a good calibre of candidates, and we believe we can appoint experienced team leaders and heads of service.
On a broader basis, what is critical here is the stability of the workforce, so we have put in retention payments. We have reviewed the salaries. We are on rolling recruitment processes. We have brought in community resource workers to support our social workers. We are looking at overseas recruitment from international students studying social work currently and—
Q51 Chair: Commissioner Walker estimates that the restructure could take up to 24 months.
Kersten England: I would call that restructure indicative—
Chair: That is a long time to get your act together.
Kersten England: We are getting our act together every day.
Q52 Chair: Let me turn to Solihull, please. It could be said that you are similarly failing to reform. In the last two Ofsted inspections, children’s services were rated “requires improvement”. A recent joint targeted area inspection has led to Solihull being issued with an improvement notice due to concerns around serious weaknesses in child social care. Why has Solihull still been found to have serious weaknesses two years after the tragic murder of Arthur?
Nick Page: The joint target area inspection, as you know, Chair, is a review of probation, police, health and our social care services. It is a whole system improvement across the West Midlands area because, obviously, we respond to that at that level.
We have recruited two new assistant directors, which are key. As I said earlier, we are now—
Q53 Chair: I am asking why you still have serious weakness two years after, given everything that has gone on. Children’s services were rated “requires improvement” in two Ofsted inspections, and you have had the JTA inspection and an improvement notice. Why is that happening two years after the murder of Arthur?
Nick Page: My analysis of that, Chair, is that if Ofsted had come in within that six-month period prior to the pandemic, all our self-assessments and all our external reviews were suggesting that most of our social work would be pretty good indeed.
When Arthur was murdered, Chair, what happened then, particularly on the conviction of his murderer and his father for manslaughter, was that we saw literally in a weekend a 115% increase in contact and referrals and we fell over on that weekend. We literally fell over. We did not have enough social workers to meet phone calls and referrals.
Chair: Two years after.
Nick Page: Yes, and this—
Q54 Chair: As you know, safeguarding partners in Solihull conducted their own rapid review in July 2020 following Arthur’s death.
Nick Page: They did.
Chair: The review has led to a series of actions. As of January 2022, as I understand it, these actions have not yet been implemented. Is that correct?
Nick Page: No, most of them have been implemented now.
Chair: Since January 2022?
Nick Page: Yes.
Q55 Chair: Both of your local authorities failed to make significant changes in the wake of the cases of Arthur and Star. Bradford children’s services is still in turmoil and undergoing an extreme restructure to a new independent board, while Solihull has been issued with an improvement adviser. What exactly are you going to change to make sure that no child ever has to suffer in the way that Arthur and Star did?
Tim Browne: If I may pick that up, prior to the trial and also the JTAI, we had already put in place an extensive audit programme to identify weaknesses and areas for improvement, and we are developing an improvement plan. We appointed an independent chair to head up our improvement board, and the JTAI just confirmed the finding of our own audits. As a result of that, we put in a comprehensive improvement programme across children’s social care but also across the multiagency partnership. What is clear is that this is a partnership issue, not just a council or a social care issue, because safeguarding is, of course, everybody’s business.
What we have done is to make sure we understand and have a focus on understanding the lived experience of the child, and making sure we are recruiting more social workers. There is a national shortage and that makes it difficult for everybody. We do not want to get into bidding wars, because if we start paying over and above, we start robbing Peter to pay Paul. That is an issue we need to tackle nationally as well as locally. We have gone way over our establishment in social workers at the moment, and we are catering for the demand that we have coming through.
We are looking at reorganising and redesigning our frontline systems and our social work teams. Already we are seeing a tremendous impact on our MASH—our multiagency safeguarding hub. We have health putting in additional health workers. We also have the police putting in additional workers in the MASH, as well as early help professionals, and we have doubled our social work capacity also.
There are a whole range of different improvements there, but there is more to go. The critical bit for me is a best practice approach, so we are looking to upskill and train our social workers, the police and our health professionals to the highest standards so that they are experts in child protection.
Marium Haque: I took up post in October 2021. The first thing that I have done is to establish a very experienced leadership team to work alongside me. We have also been very active in pursuing a range of external support to come in and enable us to look at the quality of practice that we have within the service.
We have worked closely with our colleagues within the Department for Education, who have identified a sector-led improvement partner through Warrington to work alongside us. I also have the support of Steve Walker, as the commissioner, to provide additional advice to help us make sure that we are clear about our improvement journey.
That included very rapidly reviewing the former improvement plan, which was felt to be too complex and cumbersome, as referenced in one of our monitoring visits, to establish a much clearer and simpler improvement plan that allowed us to be very articulate in what we wanted to achieve in a very much outcomes-based improvement plan.
Alongside that, we have employed a well-regarded national external auditing organisation to come in and work alongside us to review the cases across all parts of the service, from all different levels within the service, so that we have a very clear understanding around the decisions that are being made and we can have confidence about where the gaps are in our practice and where we need to address them.
Last but not least, we have also, working with the commissioner, refreshed the improvement board with our DfE partners so that we have the right partners across the district sitting on the improvement board to help us move our improvement journey forward quickly.
Kersten England: Chair, may I add to that, if that is okay, or would you rather I did not?
Chair: In a nutshell.
Kersten England: In a nutshell, I think that one of our weaknesses was the fact that agency workers could leave at will. We have negotiated all the contracts with agencies so that that is no longer possible, and we have also brought in whole teams of agency workers on a fixed contract for a defined period of time.
In our establishment we have 220 agency workers covering 180 posts. We have also colocated with our police colleagues through the integrated front door and reinvested in early help, so I think it is probably important to mention those partnership dimensions.
Q56 Chair: I am going to pass to my colleagues Caroline and then Angela, but it seems to me that there were clearly problems with your children’s services in the run-up to these tragedies. There have been significant problems since, as I have quoted to you today, and the reforms that you say you are doing seem to be taking an incredibly long time to actually make a difference. I think that would be a fair observation.
Kersten England: We would accept that the pace of improvement has been too slow. It is generally observed that the improvement journey, when you are “inadequate”, takes up to three years, and we embarked on that at the beginning of 2019. We went “inadequate” at the end of 2018 and then a year and a bit into that we experienced a pandemic, which undoubtedly slowed the rate of progress.
Chair: As did many other councils.
Kersten England: As did many other councils, yes.
Nick Page: We had a JTAI, as you know, Chairman, in January and now we are nearly into July. So, as my colleague Tim has described, we are rapidly improving.
Chair: I think the jury is still out on that one.
Nick Page: Ofsted will decide, yes.
Chair: Exactly. It seems to be taking an incredibly long time.
Q57 Dr Caroline Johnson: I have a couple of questions for Solihull Council. The first thing is that I am a bit disappointed with some of the comments that you have made, Tim. Clearly, the people responsible for hurting Arthur were those convicted of it—his father and his father’s partner—but is no doubt that opportunities were missed to protect him.
I appreciate it is also an extremely difficult job to identify which parent that the family refers you to will harm somebody, but saying that it is everybody’s business and it is not just a council thing—that is a phrase you have used so far—is not very helpful and it seems to me not to fully recognise the opportunities that were missed.
You also said that social workers came to visit, examined the bruises and made an assessment of their cause. Are your social workers trained to examine children and decide what bruises are caused by, particularly on an area of skin which is normally covered by clothing?
Tim Browne: If I could go to the first question initially, it is very clear that safeguarding is everybody’s business. It was not a glib comment. It is schools. It is health professionals. It is social workers—
Dr Caroline Johnson: It is not a way of passing the buck for other people, so it was everybody’s fault, not—
Tim Browne: No, no; it is very clear that every professional has a role in safeguarding. That is just a statement of fact, and I think we all recognise that. I was also very clear on the opportunities that we have missed as a council and as a local safeguarding children’s partnership, because there were a number of incidents across the partnership where we could have intervened differently and should have done.
For me, from a council perspective, the pivotal point was that a strategy discussion meeting should have taken place following the photographs of the bruising being sent to the council, and that did not take place. That, for me, is a pivotal moment as well.
Q58 Dr Caroline Johnson: It was before that, though, wasn’t it, because the photographs came slightly later? However, at the time, there was an allegation that the child was bruised and that those bruises on the child’s back had been caused by an adult who should have been caring for that child. The social worker who went in did not ask the child protection doctor, the paediatrician, to examine that child in a child protection medical, which happens routinely across the country every day, and that was the point. Several days before the photographs ended up in the possession of the authorities, action could have been taken.
You said that the social worker made that assessment. Why do we employ lots of paediatricians to make that assessment and to examine children? Because we will remove all the clothing to see if there are bruises that have not been seen on the legs, the arms or other places. Do you provide different training in Solihull to your social workers such that they are trained to make those assessments?
Tim Browne: The social worker and family support worker visited the family. They looked at the bruising and they made an assessment about the explanation given—
Dr Caroline Johnson: Do you train them to do that?
Tim Browne: They will receive training as part of their professional development. We do not specifically do that locally, but they have access to that training if they want it. If they feel that bruising has happened non-accidentally, they make a referral and take it through the correct procedures.
Q59 Dr Caroline Johnson: They did not, in this case, because the child was not referred. Have you got to the bottom of the discrepancy between the social worker’s description of this faded bit of bruising and the quite extensive and severe bruising on the child’s back described in the report, in the photograph taken just 25 hours before? Have you understood why this child seems—against the medical opinions given in court that that could not have happened, that the bruises could not have faded that quickly? Given that medical expert evidence, have you worked out why the bruising was felt to be so much milder in the eyes of this social worker, as compared to the photographs?
Tim Browne: There were two workers who saw Arthur and the bruising. That was the family support worker and the social worker. There is still a difference of opinion about the timeline for the photographs and when they took place.
Q60 Dr Caroline Johnson: The court had it specially examined, and the reference in the report says the photographs were taken on the 16th, and that was evidence provided to the court, presumably based on metadata.
Tim Browne: There remain different views and opinions about when the photographs were taken.
Dr Caroline Johnson: The court accepted the 16th, didn’t they?
Tim Browne: I do not recall the date the court accepted. I do not have the information to hand. But there does remain a difference of opinion about when the photographs were taken, and the social workers gave evidence that they saw the bruising, which was fading at the time. That is the report we have on the record, so there do remain some differences there.
Q61 Dr Caroline Johnson: Which you have not got to the bottom of, and which would have been a crucial point at which this little boy could have been saved.
The other question I have is for Mr Page. The person in charge—the director of children’s services at the time, Mrs Rees—had been appointed by you, or appointed under your tenure. Is that correct?
Nick Page: Under my tenure, yes. She was appointed by elected members.
Q62 Dr Caroline Johnson: Were you aware at the time that she had just left Stoke-on-Trent to join you, and that Stoke-on-Trent were receiving an Ofsted report at the point of appointment that said that poor leadership had led to the services for children under her tenure having seriously declined, that children were not being protected and there were widespread and serious failures, leaving children at risk of serious harm? The person appointed by your council to protect children from harm was someone who presided over such a serious decline and such risk to children. Was that a wise appointment?
Nick Page: At the time of her appointment, as I recall, the Ofsted report had not been published, so we did not have an opportunity to read it. We took references and we also put the successful candidate, Mrs Rees, through three days of tests and interviews. We were working on the information we had at that time.
Q63 Dr Caroline Johnson: Do you appoint people with a probationary period and, if so, was that report published during her probation period?
Nick Page: If you are already a local government employee, we cannot run a probation period, but I will supervise as their line manager to make absolutely sure all the targets we have for them are being met.
Q64 Dr Caroline Johnson: If somebody is not working in a job across your local authorities, and they are failing in that job, if they move quickly before that catches up with them, they are then in a position where you cannot do anything about it. Even though you received this report that says she was doing a dreadful job or there was a dreadful job being done in Stoke-on-Trent in her previous capacity, there is nothing you can do about it because effectively she has continuous employment. Is that right?
Nick Page: No, because I would, as line manager, pick up on her performance in her current role with me and make absolutely sure that all the targets we were set, all the evidence, all the data, was proving she could do the job, and that is what the case was.
Q65 Dr Caroline Johnson: Ofsted comes to the conclusion that she could not, because the Ofsted reports of Solihull show that you were still requiring improvements, so things were not going well. Presumably, by the time the evidence catches up with her on that—in this case, she resigned and retired—you could have a situation where people who are underperforming in public services just keep moving round and round and round without any opportunity to deal with that.
Nick Page: It is always a risk within any profession. I am going through the recruitment process for a permanent director of children’s services at the moment. I am talking to previous employers and people who worked with those candidates. I met with those candidates, as I did with all the candidates in that round. They come and visit and spend a day with me. They go through psychometric testing. They have multiple panel interviews and then a members’ panel interview, so it is a pretty robust process.
Q66 Dr Caroline Johnson: You spoke to Stoke-on-Trent Council and were given no indication that the services she looked after were failing. That is very disappointing. Do you think that when people are moving not within the council, but between councils, a probationary period would be a useful additional tool for you?
Nick Page: It could be another tool to help us improve performance, yes.
Q67 Chair: Would you not have known that the previous council was a failing council when you appointed this person? It would not be top secret.
Nick Page: There are two things, if I may, Chair. First, I have to be honest that I do not know anywhere in this country at the moment where any of my peers—I talk to a lot of chief executives—feel that confident and comfortable about our children’s services, because of the pressures.
Dr Caroline Johnson: Lincolnshire children’s services received an excellent rating, so it can be done.
Chair: My own council, Essex, certainly does not have your kind of problems.
Dr Caroline Johnson: Nowhere is ever going to be perfect, and tragedies can always happen, but the services should be good.
Nick Page: I totally agree with that. My next-door authority, Warwickshire, has just got “good” for their inspection, and they are helping us. They are providing us with key workers, social workers working alongside our team.
Chair: You are not answering the question, which is a very simple one. Did you know, yes or no, that there were?
Nick Page: We did not know the extent of the failure in Stoke.
Q68 Chair: Would you not have checked it out before you appointed?
Nick Page: I did not know the extent of failure in Stoke.
Q69 Chair: You would not have checked it out or done due diligence just to check?
Nick Page: I had done due diligence.
Q70 Chair: How could you, if you did not know what was going on in the council?
Nick Page: The report was not published at the time.
Q71 Dr Caroline Johnson: The point is that the lack of probation period meant that once it was published, you could not do anything about it, other than to try to manage that underperformance until she moved on again.
Nick Page: We had signed a contract with her.
Dr Caroline Johnson: This cannot be the only individual working in our local authorities who is doing this moving, moving, moving thing. She cannot be the only person who has been appointed—
Chair: Even had the full report not been published, for a council chief executive to find out from another chief executive what was going on in that council’s children’s services would not have taken much effort on your part.
Q72 Dr Caroline Johnson: Is there a financial implication to this? Is it that if you were to manage somebody in a way that highlighted their poor performance and then wanted to get rid of them, it is very expensive and very difficult, and it is easier to allow them to move somewhere else? Could that be happening?
Nick Page: Not in my council. If somebody is not performing and their indicators show they are not performing, they will be followed down a competency route.
Q73 Angela Richardson: Starting with Ms England, could you briefly outline your roles and responsibilities in your current position and, in a little bit more detail, what duties and responsibilities you have in terms of safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children? Please all answer the same question.
Kersten England: I am chief executive of the organisation. I am head of the paid service. I am responsible for advising the administration of the council on policy, strategy, priorities and resourcing. I am a leader of the system of agencies in my district as well.
In relation to children’s services, I have a statutory responsibility, and there are four individuals who have a statutory responsibility—the leader, the chief executive, the portfolio holder and the DCS—for the safeguarding of children. My specific role is to chair the strategic leadership group of the safeguarding partners to ensure we have an independent chair appointed to chair the children’s safeguarding board, and it is to undertake the line management support ensuring the resourcing of the work of the director of children’s services. I am currently a member of the improvement board in Bradford around children’s services improvement. I am also working on the formation of the children’s trust.
Marium Haque: As the director of children’s services, I have the statutory role that covers across education and children’s social care, particularly with regard to safeguarding welfare. It is around ensuring that all our statutory duties and responsibilities around children’s social care are able to be discharged. That is from the point of a contact and referral being made through to, where appropriate, taking things through proceedings and bringing children into care. The other side of it is going through the discharge of a care order. That could mean going through a placement order and going into adoption, or potentially discharging a care order altogether and a child being reunified back with their family, and everything that goes in and around that. It is around working with our partners and making sure they are aware of their duties and responsibilities, and identifying gaps and ensuring that those gaps are addressed with regard to moving things on as a partnership.
Nick Page: I am very similar to my colleague Kirsten in our statutory roles. As head of the paid service, I am responsible for all our statutory duties as a council in safeguarding. I am one of what we call the quartet: myself, the chief constable, the chief of our health system and our independent chair. In our context we have an independent board that Tim described earlier, and I report for council services with the DCS into that board.
Tim Browne: Very similar to Marium: professional responsibility for leadership of strategy and effectiveness of the local authority safeguarding arrangements, and across education as well, so a very similar role.
Q74 Angela Richardson: Ms England, can I come back to something you said? There were four people who held that statutory responsibility. You are officers. Has there been any political accountability at all?
Kersten England: In terms of political accountability, we have a new portfolio holder for children’s services as of May 2021.
Angela Richardson: Can I ask the same question of Solihull?
Nick Page: We have a new portfolio for children’s services who was appointed in May 2022.
Q75 Angela Richardson: No leadership changes in terms of the leader of the council?
Kersten England: Not the leader of the council.
Nick Page: Not in my council.
Q76 Angela Richardson: Moving to Mr Browne and Mr Page in Solihull, it is clear from your earlier answers that you have not done everything you could have possibly done to fulfil all your duties and responsibilities as far as Arthur Labinjo-Hughes is concerned. You identified failures in information sharing, strategy discussion meetings and failures across agencies. Given the powers and duties you have just talked about, and that have been laid down in law for many years, why?
Nick Page: As a matter of record, Tim was not appointed at that time in Solihull.
Q77 Angela Richardson: I appreciate you have talked about the things you are doing going forward and the last six months of improvement, but this is not new information that councils are responsible for these things. Why weren’t these powers that you had that were outlined in the Children Act being used?
Nick Page: I can describe what I do and did then. On a weekly basis I would meet with the director of children’s services. I would look at key statistics, case re-referrals, case numbers, case quality, and bring in the auditors to have a look at that, absolutely focused on where we were with our improvement work linked to our improvement plan. Also, I would go out with social workers on the frontline, go and do visits, speak to children myself, speak to their parents, speak to their carers, go to their schools and speak to their teachers to try to triangulate what I was seeing in that data and what was happening on the ground. Where it was not triangulating, I would then go and investigate further, with my auditors.
In Arthur’s case, as you can see, as the Committee and Annie have identified, we did not do what we should have done, and we missed those opportunities. My question to myself and the question held by all those layers of accountability is: is that a systemic issue? Are we missing more with those children? At the moment we are still missing too many. Part of that is that at the moment, we do not have enough social workers. Within that, to be specific, in my experience the key people who make the difference here are the team managers. In the military sense, it is the sergeants, the NCOs, who maybe have four or five social workers—they can be newly qualified, and some can be reasonably experienced—who can sit down with them every morning and say, “Who are you seeing today? Which cases are you working with? Why did you make that decision there?” It is that ground-level expertise. That is, in my humble opinion as a non-social worker, what keeps children safe. At the moment, we cannot find those people.
Q78 Angela Richardson: Can I ask you a question that the Chair asked of Ms Hudson earlier? There is talk about body-worn cameras. I understand there is the professional judgment of the social worker, but in terms of triangulating and another pair of eyes looking, how would you feel about that being a change in practice?
Nick Page: Right now in this Committee, and with what my team are going through, I would probably say yes, to be honest with you. I have two social workers who have had to leave their own homes and move with their children and families because of death threats to them. A lot of us are getting threats and death threats on a daily basis at the moment. I understand that you, as parliamentarians, also go through that, sadly. Anything that protect the professions and encourages more youngsters to do social work degrees and come through into the profession—and encourages more experienced people to stay, and not to go and work for Waitrose or other places, as with one of our cases in recent days—and that demonstrates to the general public the work they do, I would be interested in.
Q79 Angela Richardson: It strikes me that if you have workforce issues, using digitisation or anything that will make that easier would be a benefit. Also, you talk about the protection of your workforce. Today, we are very much concerned with the protection of children. It is great that you have been able to go out yourself and go along, but it strikes me that if there was a second pair of eyes looking at bruising—at the conversation, at the body language, as my colleague raised earlier—it would give an extra layer of protection, not only for your workforce but for the children themselves and potentially for any family members who are being wrongly accused.
Nick Page: I could not agree more.
Chair: Because Ian, Kim and Miriam have other commitments, I will bring Kim and Ian in and then Miriam, so you can get your questions in.
Q80 Ian Mearns: My Browne and Mr Page, one of the main conclusions made in the national review into Arthur’s death was that professionals did not always hear Arthur’s voice, as they often relied on the father’s perspective. What is your response to that?
Tim Browne: I think that is evident. It is clear, particularly through the JTAI and through the auditing work we have done, that we have not understood the experience of children to the extent we should have done. That is why we are doing a major piece of work around that with our newly qualified social workers, but also our experienced social workers, to make sure that is absolutely pivotal in our practice day in and day out. Unless you understand the experience of the child, you have not understood the situation, so that has to be critical.
Q81 Ian Mearns: Another conclusion that the review made was that Arthur’s wider family members were not listened to or heard. Why were Arthur’s family members not listened to?
Tim Browne: There was a particular narrative created that the wider family did not appreciate or accept the relationship between Arthur’s father and his partner, and that was given credibility by the family themselves, by Arthur’s father and his partner. More weight was given to their perspective than the wider family perspective, which is really disappointing. That is one of the issues we need to make sure we grapple with, and it is an issue of disguised compliance that social workers locally and nationally have to face every day.
Q82 Ian Mearns: Other family members were not listened to, and Arthur was not listened to. We listened to the parents or the parent, who were then subsequently involved in Arthur’s murder.
Tim Browne: Right.
Ian Mearns: What particular reflections have you both made as senior leaders in Solihull in the aftermath of this tragedy, and are you taking steps to ensure these mistakes never happen again?
Tim Browne: Yes, we are. We have looked at ourselves long and hard and we have had many discussions and debates, looking at both practice and leadership and looking forward to see how we can take the services through where we are now to being outstanding services. We have a wide-ranging improvement programme in place that looks at both our own services and also the police, health and the local safeguarding children partnership. That is being driven hard and at pace, because pace is the key thing for us here. We cannot stay where we are, but we are determined to make safeguarding the very best it can be.
The difficult thing is that we have some tremendous social workers, and I am so proud of the social work workforce locally and nationally because they are working in some of the most horrendous situations. They are doing some of the hardest jobs and detecting some of the hardest crimes that happen behind closed doors. It is about how we can upskill them and help them work those cases in a way that will make sure children are as safe as they possibly can be.
Q83 Ian Mearns: You mentioned earlier recruitment and retention of team leaders. Given what you know needs to be done to do this preventative work into the future, what extra are you doing until those team leaders can be recruited?
Nick Page: We have a team of experts in from next door in Warwickshire. I spoke to their chief executive, and she has given us those people. We have also brought in experts from other councils in the West Midlands. We have staff coming in, both at the frontline but also as the checkers of the checkers, as I describe them, to make sure that work is good quality. Then there is the council, through our elected members. We have increased the funding this year to nearly £50 million from £44 million last year. Also, our children’s services have no savings to make. We are literally putting everything we have behind the team to deliver what they must deliver.
Q84 Ian Mearns: The other significant thing, Mr Browne, is that you mentioned how excellent the social workers are. What are the casework loads like?
Tim Browne: They vary. We aim for the core team to have caseloads around 15 and for others to have around 18. During last month we saw an upsurge, so we were around 27, but they have fallen back to around 24. We had additional teams start two weeks ago, and they will reduce the workload further, so we are looking to get back under 20 as quickly as we possibly can.
Q85 Ian Mearns: Do those casework loads compare with the normal across local authorities?
Tim Browne: Probably we were higher, but now we are probably lower.
Q86 Ian Mearns: At the time this dreadful incident took place, were the casework loads high then?
Tim Browne: Yes, they were high.
Q87 Kim Johnson: I have a question to Nick and Kersten. We heard earlier about recommendations, and how often recommendations are not implemented. I would like to hear from you how you can explain what changes you have made within both your authorities to ensure there is better inter-agency working and these issues do not happen again.
Kersten England: I will start and pass to Nick. It is important to say that we did our own internal review ahead of the national panel report and we started to take action immediately to learn lessons. You have heard me speak about what we have done in relation to renegotiation of agency contracts and making sure we have greater stability in the workforce. We are also working with our multiagency partners around a number of interventions to strengthen our practice across the pathway.
For example, on early help, reinvestment in early help and co-location, I visited one of our early help centres recently, and police, health visitors and the voluntary sector are all now embedded in there, working together with families at the earliest opportunity. We have a co-located integrated front door, but we have observed the volume of demand coming through the front door and the resulting investigations are very high. Annie Hudson mentioned that sometimes you cannot see the wood for the trees, so we are working with our partners on a model called the David Thorpe model, where you have a live conversation between all partners at the front door, rather than relying on referral forms, which has been shown to significantly increase the quality of practice and appropriate referrals through.
As we speak, there are about 200 of our staff across health, police and local authority in a webinar, all reflecting on the learning from this. We spent last week in our safeguarding partnership resetting our expectations of our safeguarding work together. I could go on, but I will pass across to my colleague Nick.
Nick Page: I will go straight to the partners. An independently chaired improvement board is the fulcrum point that we pulled together, so I now speak on a weekly basis with the assistant chief constable for safeguarding for the West Midlands police. My leader speaks with the police and crime commissioner on a regular catch-up. The chief executive of our integrated care system sits on our improvement board, and so does the chair of the integrated care system for Birmingham Solihull. I report back into those boards as well with all the other partners around those safeguarding. We have tried to close that loop of those partners in that strategic area. The challenge, as you recognise, is now making sure that filters all the way through to front-line police officers, GPs and health visitors.
Q88 Miriam Cates: I want to pick up on some comments you have made about how difficult it is to recruit social workers both at sergeant level, as you put it, but also at director level. One of the problems is being able to recruit people of high enough calibre to turn the ship around and make a difference, not just in your councils but, as you mentioned, lots of councils are not feeling confident about their children’s services. Could you reflect on the incentives, rewards and job satisfaction, and the potential risks that candidates might feel when they apply for those jobs? At the moment, there are risks for people going into those positions when things go wrong that are not necessarily their fault; they might have been the fault of predecessors or just changes over time. What can we do to incentivise high-calibre people to go into those roles, as a society as well as a government?
Nick Page: If I may start on that, first it is about our respect for the profession and the vocation of social work. I do not want to underplay that. I think it is really important. When I talk to students in universities who are thinking of becoming social workers, most will go off somewhere else—I hope it is not down to me speaking to them, but there we are. We just cannot get enough people to come in.
The system issue, and I am conscious of time, is that we have to try to move—I absolutely understand where you are as a Committee and where all our regulators are, and I understand where the general public is. In our case, this lovely little boy was brutally murdered, and we did not do what we should have done. How do we work through the blame that everyone feels, and the responsibility, into a system where in the UK we can learn? I am not clever enough to explain to you, as parliamentarians, how you do that, but after 33 years of doing this type of work, I know that that is the only way we will get the next generation in to do the brave work that these people do. I think that is the biggest challenge we have.
Q89 Miriam Cates: Unless there is a supportive culture where when people make mistakes, they are able to rapidly learn but not to be blamed to the point of no return—of course, there will always be cases where there are catastrophic failures and where it is a dismissal—why would anyone take the risk of entering that profession? If that is the case, all children lose out.
Nick Page: I was working with another chief executive. They have Ofsted with them at the moment to try to understand. It is helping my learning. They had a principal social worker who was physically sick as she went to meet the inspectors. She had been working in that role for 35 years. That is the pressure they are under at the moment. A number of you have already stated your local authorities where your constituents do really well. We need to find a different way of having those different narratives with them.
Q90 Tom Hunt: Kersten, I understand you have been in place since 2015. How many different directors of children’s services have there been while you have been there?
Kersten England: There have been two substantive post holders and two interim DCSs. It is almost inevitable when a DCS resigns that you will have an interim in place for some time, because of the length of time it takes to recruit a director of children’s services.
Q91 Tom Hunt: We had the Ofsted report in 2018, which was incredibly concerning. I imagine that building up to that, you probably had some concerns about where things could be heading.
In the time you have been chief executive, which is about seven years, how actively involved have you been in trying to turn a failing department around?
Kersten England: I have been incredibly active. As you know, I have statutory responsibilities. In addition, I am responsible for the performance of my organisation. Currently, I estimate that two thirds of my time is spent on children’s services. That is about supporting the business-as-usual activity, the improvement activity and the building of a new organisation, the children’s trust. I have sat on the improvement board throughout this period. I have worked with the improvement adviser. I have maintained relationships with the Department for Education and also the regulator regularly, with the four statutory post holders. My wider organisation has marshalled support, money and other resources to support children’s services.
Like Nick, I have visited children in different settings, whether at the Looked After Children’s Council or residential homes. I have met with foster carers. I have visited social work teams. I have been involved in specific cases that have been particularly complex and interagency, where there have been challenging decisions about placement. I have been heavily engaged.
Q92 Tom Hunt: Over the time you have been chief executive, you have been actively involved in children’s services work—in trying to make it work. Why do you think you have failed in turning that around?
Kersten England: Quite a bit of this is covered in the commissioner’s report earlier this year. It does reflect that both the leader and I have been very engaged and visible. It also reflects that we have been quite demanding, because this isn’t good enough. This is on our watch, and children are our first priority. We are the youngest place in the United Kingdom, with 149,000 children under the age of 18.
The commissioner went on to reflect that there were a number of issues that became apparent. The first was that the scale of inadequacy was perhaps not adequately reflected in the ILACS judgment initially, and it took some time under the interim DCS for that to become apparent. We did know, as you have said, that since 2017, when we had a very positive JTAI inspection, there had been rapid deterioration due to an increased turnover of experienced staff going to more highly paid positions in authorities around us, which themselves had been inadequate. We were the last of the West Yorkshire authorities to go “inadequate”. So, not understanding the scale of inadequacy. Recruiting a team—it took us two rounds to recruit our DCS. However, all the team came well referenced through competitive market processes, but they were stepping up in the scale and complexity of what they were taking on.
Q93 Tom Hunt: The issue many people will have is that this tragedy did not come out of nowhere. It came, frankly, at the back of years of a failing service. Clearly, what happened with Star was a tragedy of immense proportions, which I imagine has caused huge upset and distress, obviously, to her family and friends but probably actually to the whole area, who have been saddened. For your council to turn a leaf, would you have some sympathy for their view that they might feel it is impossible to do so under your leadership?
Kersten England: I have considered that. I live in that community. I live not very far from where Star lived. I am deeply aware of the distress and anguish it has caused to Star’s family, friends of Star’s family who also made referrals, and the wider community. I am aware of the depth of community anguish.
I have also heard those views. As I said earlier, I have reflected very long and hard. I know the disruption it has caused, the resignation of DCSs and the instability that brings with it. I have concluded that at this point in time, I take responsibility for staying in position, taking the challenges and being held to account—in the way you rightly are—and for putting it right.
Q94 Tom Hunt: Ultimately, this is what failure looks like. Ultimately, as a chief executive, the buck stops with you. As you say, you have been actively involved in children’s services. If accountability does not lie with you, where does it lie? Can I broaden my question out? If I have missed it, I am sorry. Has anyone lost their job because of these two tragedies?
Nick Page: Not in my authority, no.
Kersten England: A number of the people who were involved in this case have departed the local authority. They chose to do so. We have looked at the performance of all the others who remained and whether there are capability issues. We have made a couple of referrals and we have also done learning reviews with those who were involved.
Q95 Tom Hunt: Quickly to you, Nick, are some of those social workers who were intensely involved with that failure still working at your authority?
Nick Page: The social workers who were involved directly with Arthur, both of them are off work. One has had a breakdown. The other one we are trying to get back into work at the moment. We have changed some of our leadership. You are aware of that as the Committee. Like Kersten and her team, day by day we are going through all the learning, all the training and the retraining to try to get our team where it needs to be.
Q96 Tom Hunt: Various colleagues on this Committee have gone into detail about how perplexing it is that some of those mistakes were made in terms of the bruising, not picking up on the body language and coming to the conclusion that somehow Arthur was very safe and very happy. What explanations have they given to you for how they got it so wrong?
Nick Page: We have done the immediate review, which Tim has described. We went through that as soon as Arthur’s death was notified. We went through every single stage. Again, you recognise as a Committee the issue around those photographs and why we did not have that review. Again, I have—with Tim and with my political leadership in the council—been through the chronology three times, every single time looking at why we did not do this, where the deficit was, why we did not do that and what we need to change. We have gone through it forensically before Annie and the panel even arrived.
Q97 Tom Hunt: This is the final point from me. I think it was two individuals who were most closely connected to the Arthur case. You would have confidence in them going back into work and supporting young people in your area?
Nick Page: With the right systems and the structures around them, I would.
Q98 Anna Firth: Following on from that, in 2008 Sharon Shoesmith was sacked by the board as head of children’s services in Haringey after the death of Baby P. Are you surprised you are still in post?
Kersten England: As I say, the DCS is no longer with us because they chose to resign. I have considered resignation. I think I have made it clear to the Committee that in order to provide that kind of clear, calm stability for Marium—as interim DCS—at a time when we are recruiting experience, when we are establishing the trust, and when I am working very closely with the DfE and our regulator, I have chosen to remain in post.
Nick Page: I am obviously employed by the council. If the leader of the council and the councillors felt I was incapable of carrying out my duties then, clearly, they would sack me.
Q99 Anna Firth: Coming back to the point the Chair made, clearly you have both been involved in children’s services since 2014-15 and there is no improvement. By the way, I respect what you have said, Kersten; that you have considered resignation and you do not think it is appropriate because you want to put things right. We are two years on, and nothing is right. When does the time come when you recognise that you are not going to succeed and you are part of the problem?
Nick Page: For me, it is when we cannot show on a weekly basis that we have a grip of the cases of those children we need to have a grip of and when I cannot get police, health, probation and education support for those children. I am absolutely clear that having done that director of children’s services job, and having turned around a local authority, I know what those signals are. As soon as I see any of those signals, I will go.
Kersten England: I agree with Nick. In the last eight months, under Marium’s leadership and with an experienced team around her, we have seen stabilisation and a reduction in open cases. We are starting to see a slight reduction in volume of demand. We are seeing greater engagement in strategy meetings from our partners. The most recent monitoring visit inspection undertaken by our regulator noticed some good, strong multiagency practice.
They still point to the lack of consistency in practice due to the instability of the workforce. Therefore, I am straining every nerve to get as many good social workers recruited and in place as possible. If we cannot turn that around, I will step away.
Q100 Anna Firth: Thank you. The third point on this line of questioning, which is important for the general public and the family, is that your salaries are huge by any normal measure. According to the papers, Kersten—this may or may not be right, so do correct it—you are paid somewhere in the region of £194,628, and a pension on top of that of £33,000, so total remuneration somewhere in the region of £228,350. Do you think your current salary is justified, given what has happened here?
Kersten England: The salary is based on an assessment of the scale and complexity of responsibility and the risk I carry for the fifth-largest metropolitan district in the country and one of the most deprived. That was the level the salary was set at. I work every day to justify that salary. I am working very hard to stabilise and improve children’s services.
Q101 Anna Firth: Have you thought that, given what has happened here, perhaps it would be appropriate not to draw the full salary?
Kersten England: No, I have not considered that. In the last two years I have worked 70 hours a week battling through a pandemic, as all chief executives of local government have, seven days a week.
Q102 Chair: Many of my constituents have been working long hours, and they do not get paid like you. They do not have the failures your council has had, and they have not been indirectly responsible for the murder of a child.
Kersten England: I understand that. That is the scale of risk and responsibility we carry.
Q103 Anna Firth: Nick, can I ask you the same question please?
Nick Page: When I first started teaching in London, I slept on a mattress on the floor of a colleague’s house. I did lunch duty so I could get a hot meal. That is where I started. I have gone back to university to train and do all this to get this role. I never thought I would ever get to a chief executive role in anything. That is me.
Anna Firth: With respect, would you mind answering the question?
Nick Page: I will answer the question that that salary is set to recruit the people to do the types of roles we do and to take on the 1,500 legal duties we have on the 430 laws. It is set by the council. I am privileged enough to have that role.
Q104 Anna Firth: Can you see that to the public you are heading up a service that is failing? You are heading up a service where a child has been murdered in the most horrendous circumstances. I am sure I was not the only mother in this country who found it hard to sleep that week when we all heard what had happened. I am sure, and I hope, the same thing would have happened to you. Do you not recognise that the general public would consider that drawing a full salary at this sort of level does seem inappropriate given the level of failure you have been presiding over?
Nick Page: Yes.
Q105 Anna Firth: Thank you for your honesty.
You have heard me ask questions about the fact that these deaths took place during the national lockdown. One of the problems with the lockdown was that it was devastating for vulnerable children. This is a quick question to anyone who wishes to answer it. Would you agree that a complete closure of schools should never happen again?
Tim Browne: I am very happy to answer that. It should be avoided at all costs if it could possibly be avoided. You never know what is going to happen in the future. However, if we can make sure that vulnerable children, particularly, are protected in some way, shape or form should another pandemic occur, we ought to be doing that. It is a risky strategy closing schools completely, because you end up not seeing the most vulnerable children, and we need to have eyes on them.
Marium Haque: I am very mindful that in the case of Star, she would not have fit into the age range of school. It is important for us to also recognise that the closure of early years providers impacted on that age group of very young children. It is important when we look at things in the future to recognise that the entire education system as a whole, which includes the early years sector, has an important role to play in the protection and welfare of children and young people.
Tim Browne: It is also important to mention the role of teachers. While we did close schools, that was also to protect the teaching staff and the school operation.
Q106 Anna Firth: We are not here to talk about the teaching staff. We are here to talk about children who were abused and murdered by the very people who should have been protecting them.
If the schools are closed, these children become far less visible, to the point where they are invisible if there are no social workers going around, and clearly there were from time to time here. My point is a very simple one. Do you recognise that the closing of schools is devastating for vulnerable children?
Kersten England: We do recognise that. We do recognise that, yes.
Tim Browne: We have already answered that question.
Q107 Anna Firth: Thank you. I going to shortcut my next question because we have been here quite a long time.
I am very concerned to hear you saying that it is all about lack of partnership working. We have the chronology here. We have been through it in some detail. What happened, particularly in the case here of Arthur, is that individuals failed to recognise warning signs, or ignored them. They then communicated that there was nothing wrong. This happened multiple times in April 2020. This was not a problem with partnership working. This was individual partners each failing, devastatingly, in their role. Would you agree?
Tim Browne: It was, in part. We have a number of agencies that should have carried out responsibilities differently. All that information should have been brought together as a partnership. As I said before, the critical point for me was that all that information was not brought together as part of the strategy discussion, where all that information would have been revealed and those debates and discussions could have happened.
Q108 Anna Firth: If the information had been brought together, Tim, what would have happened is that the social worker would have said she had no concerns and the police would have said they had no concerns. How would two people both saying they had no concerns have improved matters?
Tim Browne: It is wider than that. We have other agencies involved as well, so there would have been more understanding of the mental health difficulties that members of the family were experiencing. We would have had information from the schools about what was going on there and the rationale for Arthur not being in school. There is a whole raft of other bits of information that just were not there so they could not make informed decisions. I think both your points are right: there were individual agency failings but also a partnership failing as well.
Q109 Anna Firth: There are two specific points that I want to be sure will never happen again. On 16 April the emergency duty team, to be fair to them, wanted the police to go around and carry out a safe and well visit. The police denied that request, which is number one.
Chair: For the benefit of the listeners, can you say which council you are talking about?
Anna Firth: We are talking about Solihull. The second one was when a social worker went around, looked at the bruises and said she had absolutely no concerns. I apologise; I said two, but there is a third one, at the end of April, when it was concluded that no further investigation was needed. It was hoped that the family would be satisfied with an offer of a life story, which would give the opportunity to monitor and escalate safeguarding concerns. Arthur’s father declined. Therefore, it was left to the very person who was perpetuating the abuse to have the power to decline that intervention.
Can you assure us that in each of those three cases, lessons have been learned and those failings will never be repeated in your council?
Chair: Can I ask you to answer in a nutshell, please?
Tim Browne: What I can say is that all the improvement work we are doing is to limit the possibility of any of those aspects happening again. Of course, I can never guarantee or promise they will not, but we are limiting the possibility as far as we can to make safeguarding the very best it can be.
Chair: I will bring in Caroline, and then I have one or two final questions.
Q110 Dr Caroline Johnson: I have a question for each team—Bradford’s team first. Are you confident that the procedures you have put in place since Star’s tragic death would mean that if a similar case were to occur again, the same mistakes would not be repeated?
Marium Haque: Very quickly, I would say yes, mainly because we have undertaken a lot of work with our frontline social workers and also, very importantly, with our team managers. Therefore, they can offer robust and supportive supervision to social workers—particularly on the issues around disguised compliance, coercive relationships and hidden partners—and, very importantly, spending time reflecting and thinking about the lived experience of the child, because that was the area we felt very strongly was completely missed.
Q111 Dr Caroline Johnson: For the team from Solihull, are you confident if any of your social workers come across a child like Arthur, the same mistakes will not be made? In particular, in a child where bruising is alleged to have occurred by someone supposed to be caring for the child, are you confident that a strategy meeting will be held? Are you confident a doctor will be asked to examine that child? A doctor will be able to look at the whole child and make medical comments on whether the alleged mechanism is real or fake.
Tim Browne: One of the significant pieces we are doing is resetting our thresholds in the MASH. Therefore, when social workers receive cases, they are looking at the evidence they have received and making those decisions about whether it should go forward for a strategy decision. That information will go into the strategy discussion and then the health professional will be able to give a professional opinion about whether that is accidental or non-accidental bruising, and then it will go into a full-scale investigation.
Q112 Dr Caroline Johnson: The answer was not terribly clear to me; perhaps you could be a little clearer. Are you saying that if a child is referred by a family member or someone who says there is bruising and provides photographs of bruising—like happened to Arthur—they will not be ignored and the child will be examined?
Tim Browne: Yes, they will.
Q113 Dr Caroline Johnson: They will; fine. Will you be auditing that? Will you be looking at auditing within your department the number of times children are referred with bruising and what the outcomes and decisions made for those children are?
Tim Browne: Yes, we have a continual auditing cycle. A report is given to me each month about what the findings are. We take action accordingly if we find any deficits, and we highlight any areas of good practice as well.
Q114 Chair: I asked this of the previous witness. In terms of Bradford and Star, given that you knew the problems that were going on, I want to understand why in September 2020 a social worker who had no prior knowledge of Star or her family would visit the family. That social worker left the social worker team after the visit, so Star’s assessment was incomplete. Can you explain why that happened?
Marium Haque: From my look at and read of the case, the social worker went out and did the visit at a time when it was not clear they were intending to leave. The idea was that this was going to be a longer-term relationship with the family.
Chair: The social worker—I do not know if it was a he or she—had no prior knowledge of the family.
Marium Haque: They had access to the child’s file. When you have a transfer, because we do have members of staff, as does everywhere, leave one place and—
Q115 Chair: When you have known serious problems, surely you would send an experienced person who knows the case inside out, rather than sending someone who then leaves the social worker team and leaves the assessment incomplete.
Marium Haque: The agency worker who was employed at the time was an experienced social worker. The previous social worker was less experienced.
Chair: I am talking about someone with significant knowledge.
Marium Haque: From what I can see from the file, the previous social worker who had been engaged was less experienced. The social worker you are referring to, who went out and read the notes, was more experienced at the time. I suggest that perhaps they did not consider all the information within the wider context and, therefore, perhaps, also did not take that into account when they were looking at the assessment, which in my view was very much focused on the views of the parent and her partner rather than considering Star.
Q116 Chair: I bring up that point. Every single way you look, there is one catalogue of errors after another in both tragic cases.
I have never said this to witnesses before while I have been Chair of the Committee, but I do find this session not just tragic but also depressing. It has taken so long to reform what went wrong, the catalogue of errors. Also, it has taken so long to reform your children’s services, to turn them into a first-class service that families deserve across your areas. I find that very depressing. I genuinely hope never to see you again. I said that to the previous witness, but in the sense that we do not have these kinds of tragedies again. Can you at least, finally, give us a timeline when you think you will have turned around these children’s services and made up for what went wrong?
Kersten England: As you understand, we are in the process of forming a children’s trust that will be wholly focused on and dedicated to services to children and child protection. We cannot take our eye off the improvement journey. I commit that within the year, we will be an adequate children’s service.
Chair: Adequate or good?
Kersten England: We will be adequate with an intention to move to good, with features of good. There is already some extraordinary and good practice; I want to emphasise that. Some of our social workers do exemplary work in the most difficult situations. We need to be adequate with many good features in a year’s time.
Nick Page: Stabilise the front door in the next few months—two months. What we need to do then is to try to allocate those additional cases that have come through. We will see clear signals of improvement within the next 10 to 12 months. I expect Ofsted to come back in and probably find us inadequate based on the Ofsted criteria at the moment, which I think is accurate. Then within 18 months to two years, we will be regarded as good.
Q117 Chair: It is going to take you two to three years to become a decent council after this having happened some time ago now?
Nick Page: Chair, if we can find those social workers—
Q118 Chair: Of course, there is this issue of social workers. Absolutely, there is an issue in recruitment and with vacancies. I understand all that. Other councils have these problems, too. There is no difference to any council. My council will have similar problems in recruitment of social workers, and I am sure your councils will. Yet that excuse is not given as a reason for failure and to take years and years to turn your council around just to provide a decent service to children and families.
Nick Page: When I have done it in other councils, Chair—those councils are now good—it took me three years. It is about getting the social workers in, building the quality police work and building the quality health work as well. It is a complex system, and the jigsaw takes too long.
Chair: Thank you for your time.