Subterfuge@Swansea

Swansea Council’s spin-corps have been drip-feeding the local media with assurances on how things are steadily improving in its childrens services. These claims may well be correct, but the dreadful extent to which the service was allowed to descend into almost total disarray will become clear next week – more or less.

Word in the corridors at Calamity Hall is that the local authority is finally going to publish a series of serious case reviews conducted by the Swansea Safeguarding Children Board over the last three years. Each deals with the deaths of three different youngsters who were in the care of childrens services at the time. The reviews give an account of events leading up to the deaths and identify a series of systemic departmental failings.

Among them will be a summary report of the circumstances under which Carly Townsend died at the hands of her family just hours after she was visited by a social worker. The report has been waiting publication since 2007 and it is alleged that the other reviews were available early last year.

According to social care professionals outside the city, the verdict in each review is that departmental failings contributed to the death of the youngsters. One document is understood to highlight a total lack of procedures and details serious shortcomings by staff & management who repeatedly ignored referrals by other agencies regarding vulnerable youngsters.

The same sources believe that senior council figures at Swansea have deliberately engineered the delays as part of a damage limitation exercise. The corporate philosophy appears to be that a ‘single hit’ is more manageable from a PR perspective than a prolonged succession of damaging findings & recommendations along with all those tiresome questions about why no-one in a senior position has been sacked or even disciplined.

But the key part of this breathtakingly cynical strategy is the timing which is intended to ensure that any recriminations arising from the serious case reviews will be short-lived and quickly overtaken by positive news from the government team who have been camping out in social services ever since the department found itself placed in special measures. They are expected to make their report just a week later.

Slick timing also reportedly plays a large part in the process of bullshitting briefing backbench councillors who will get the official version at 5pm on Thursday giving them the whole evening to digest three reports before the contents go public sometime on Friday - and leaving the weekend to lessen the media impact even further. 

The briefing will not come from the reports’ authors but will be given by a senior social services official who was not actually running things during the relevant period. (The person responsible at the time has since been allowed to take early retirement - nod, wink and so forth).

And if things follow the usual pattern, the press will be offered edited highlights by the council spinners instead of the full reports which will be posted on some obscure part of the council website. It remains to be seen if they get away with it but we hear whispers that other plans to shine the shit spotlight a bit wider had to be aborted when other agencies, most notably the police, refused to play ball over blame-sharing this time around.

Strangely, the political fallout from these further revelations of poor standards and mismanagement is difficult to predict. The ruling Lib Dem and Independent coalition has simply refused to accept responsibility for allowing Swansea’s childrens services to spiral from best-in-class to basket-case in just a few years and there is not much that anyone can do about it.

If anything, the fact that these serious case reviews into fatalities were actually in progress whilst cross-party scrutiny groups were busy stroking each other over how well they had embraced their corporate commitments is as much an indictment of their inability to uncover the real state of affairs as it of those who have sought to conceal delay the truth.

As regards the shabby attempts at media-management, anyone who has an inkling of how local government works will know that it is inconceivable that these arrangements could have been made without the knowledge - if not the outright connivance - of cabinet level members within the ruling Liberal Democrat-led coalition. This probably explains why council leader Chris Holley has asked to appear on a local Sunday phone-in show a week before the reports actually become public knowledge.

It will be interesting to see if he now gets the comparatively easy ride he had planned.