Swansea child death report was watered down

Swansea councillors meet tomorrow to discuss the contents of Serious Case Reviews into the unrelated deaths of three teenagers who died whilst notionally under the care of the local authority. They should have plenty to talk about.

One youngster identified in the official report as Child D, but later named in the press as Kyle Bates, died in January 2008 from a combination of pneumonia and drug abuse. A serious case review was prepared in January 2009 but was not published until last month. Now a leak appears to confirm earlier rumours that the delay was in order to dilute specific details of service failings and spread the blame among other agencies.

According to today’s Western Mail, the following paragraphs were deleted from the final version:

The review found that over several years the social work staff in Swansea social services department and their immediate managers failed to apply the law, appropriate procedures or any elementary standards of professional practice in carrying out their duties and responsibilities to Child D. The failings extended to poor administration and to meeting basic recording requirements.

On at least 15 occasions, police, health, education and voluntary agency staff referred information to social services concerning persistent involvement by Child D in risky and criminal behaviour, self- harming or drug and alcohol abuse and inadequate parenting from the age of 12 years. They expected action to be taken.

The review found no evidence that the failures identified in relation to Child D were due to social services staff being overwhelmed with work or other pressures. The Swansea social services department report recommended that the capability of staff involved with Child D’s case and who continue to work for the authority should be considered.

Management and supervision processes had not picked up these issues over many years.

Child D’s circumstances were not known to senior social services managers in the department until his death.

Swansea Council – presumably speaking on behalf of the Safeguarding Children Board – deny any wrongdoing and state “There has been no attempt to water down either the detail or the tone of the findings. The key findings and recommendations are the same”. The view however among social services professionals outside the city is that successive re-writes of the reports and a cynical move to combine publication of three unrelated cases as a ‘batch job’ was a device invented by council spinners and one entirely intended to lessen the negative effects upon the image of the council and the competency of the people running it.  

As Swansea West AM Andrew Davies very ably put it: “Lessons need to be learnt, but this will not happen if crucial findings are not published. This is an administration that boasted how it was going to be the most transparent in Wales, yet this latest episode belies that claim.”

The events are also symptomatic of the way that the Lib Dem-led cabinet has continually sought to evade responsibility for most things by either creating or embracing a range of arms-length bodies & working groups who are able conduct their business behind closed doors and apparently free from scrutiny by non-executive councillors. Political reliance on this institutional sleight of hand is evident in how cabinet member Nick Tregoning attempts to distance the council from any involvement despite the very obvious situation of the local director of social services chairing the body which produced the reviews and decided the timing of their joint publication.

To some, the fact that this systematic submerging of accountability has been allowed to gradually spread through the council is as much a condemnation of opposition groups as it is of the administration. Let us hope therefore that lessons have also been learned by the other group leaders and that they use tomorrow’s meeting to press for an independent public inquiry into who knew what, who did what and who covered it up. It would be a tragedy if they wasted the opportunity by just waffling on to prove to each other how clever they are.

Update: Western Mail comment

Also: Outcry as leak shows how critical comments were wiped from child care report