The Resounding Clang of the Stable Door

The further revelations and developments in the case of poor Baby P have been held up in some sections of the media as further proof of the laxity and negligence of Haringey Social Services. Personally, I think that, if anything, the whole sorry mess only serves to illustrate further the dilemma that they must have found themselves in.

It is easy to be wise after the event in cases like this, and sack two or three people in a macho purge to disguise the futile hope that a line will be drawn and the faults in the system will somehow be mended by your actions. And it plays well with the press.

But, as I have said before (so many times, that I am in danger of sounding like a broken record) this is only tinkering around the edges, treating the symptoms, not the disease.

As a society, we have created a world where bad parenting and social and economic pressures and a lack of communal respect and responsibility, have all conspired to put vulnerable children at risk. While we work on solving these long-term problems, we must have an efficient and effective safety net in the form of social workers or similar, to police and protect those children in precarious situations. Yet, as I have said before (that cracked record again) whenever something goes wrong, the social workers are the first to get pilloried in the media. It seems to be one of those jobs like being a teacher, where everybody thinks that they can do it better than you.

This kind of thinking has now been officially endorsed by Lord Laming, with the proposal that social workers should be subject to the scrutiny of lay observers on their panels, with the unspoken suggestion that social workers need “real” people to teach them common sense and keep them on the straight and narrow.

When in fact, many of their seemingly bizarre decisions are only partially reported and are done because of statutory or legal constraints to which they are subject, and which “real” people would soon bleat about the lack of, if they weren’t there.

It’s no wonder then, that in the wake of the Baby P fiasco, the numbers of people wanting to be social workers has fallen faster than a hooker’s knickers, and dried up to the extent that the Government has now to consider pumping £60million that we can ill afford into a recruitment drive, to stop the system grinding to a halt. What an expensive mistake that Gaderene rush to judgement to appease the likes of The Daily Mail has proved to be!

I am not saying – and never have said – that Haringey Social Services were totally blameless in the Baby P affair. Clearly there seem to have been shortcomings. But we also have to acknowledge the root cause of these was systemic, rather than individual. This was obviously a very complicated case, we now learn, involving two overlapping instances of abuse, investigations about the mistreatment of not one but two children, an investigation that it seems got inevitably tangled up in itself and may even have hindered itself, owing to lack of communication and co-ordination between the various bodies involved.

I don’t know who it was, off the top, who said that "the truth is never pure and rarely ever simple", but it is a maxim we should do well to keep in mind whenever we ponder the sad fate of Baby P.