Someone who has followed the Baby P case particularly closely, writes to Coffee House with the following observations:
Haringey’s lawyers concluded on 25 July 2007 that the “the threshold for initiating Care Proceedings … was not met” despite medical staff concluding in June that there was “a reasonable probability” that Baby P’s injuries had been caused by physical abuse. This suggests that the lawyers believed that Baby P “probably” being deliberately hurt was not sufficient evidence even to argue the case for a Care Order. Considering that the hurdle that has to be cleared to get a Care Order is that a child “is suffering, or is likely to suffer, significant harm” this seems a bizarre decision. Why did none of the injuries recorded in the–at least—eight further medical investigations after this meeting lead to a review of this decision? (Did anybody even seek a review?) Today, Ed Balls refused to publish the Serious Case Review that is the official internal enquiry into what went wrong. He also admitted that he has not read the crucial legal advice of the 25th July himself. But if we wish to understand what went wrong, then we have to understand how the lawyers arrived at their decision. Barry Sheerman should be summoning them to appear before his Select Committee. This case not only displays grotesque incompetence in social services but also shows just how little MPs understand the incredibly complex bureaucracies that they themselves create, how little effort they make to understand them even when they make catastrophic errors, and how weak our Parliamentary system can be in holding the executive to account with Ministers able to simply refuse to publish crucial documents
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