Children’s services ”act like Stalin or Mao”

Those who believe social services simply can’t win had their case strengthened by the new president of the high court’s family division who said their priority should be to keep families together, not separate them, despite the problems surrounding the case of Peter Connelly (aka ‘Baby P’) and countless other cases where attempting to keep families together has led to children’s deaths.

Lord Justice Wall criticised social workers at the London borough of Greenwich because they did little to support a mother whose kids were in care and who was attempting to get her life in order. The court considered the mother to be “warm and loving” but had not been able to get help from social services in extricating herself from an abusive relationship with the man who had allegedly injured her children.

Throwing out the council’s “draconian” care order for the children, Wall accused Greenwich of “very poor social work practice” and said of the mother: “She both needed and sought help and was quite improperly rebuffed by a local authority which had plainly prejudged the issue.”

Wall added: “I am very conscious of the criticism that social workers are damned if they do and damned if they do not.” But the Greenwich experience did little to silence those who believe social workers are “arrogant and enthusiastic removers of children from their parents into an unsatisfactory care system – trampling on the rights of parents and children in the process”, he said.

Wall reckoned that the Children Act gave social services a duty “to unite families rather than to separate them”, although the act says that the needs of children should always be paramount and for social workers this is the main driver behind decisions on whether or not to keep children with their birth parents.

Hilton Dawson, chief executive of the British Association of Social Workers, said that generalised remarks about ‘authoritarian’ social workers were “just plain wrong” and he was “astonished” by what Wall had said.

Greenwich council issued this statement: “Our priority was, and always will be, to protect children from being violently abused. In this case there was overwhelming evidence that a baby had been physically abused and we developed a care plan to provide safety and security for the baby and another young sibling.”

In a judgment on a separate but similar case, Wall said: “Local authorities don’t seem to understand that the public perceive them as prejudging cases of this nature.”

In this case Lord Justice Aikens said Devon County Council’s behaviour was “more like Stalin’s Russia or Mao’s China than the west of England”.