Director At Heart Of Horrific Abuse Case To Head Centre Of Excellence

A senior council official who has been at the centre of controversy over a child subjected to horrific abuse by her parents has been appointed to head the official agency that promotes good practice in social work.
Julie Jones, currently director of children’s services for Westminster in central London, is to become chief executive of the Social Care Institute for Excellence (Scie). Her appointment by the body, which has independent charitable status but is government-funded, has been endorsed by the Department of Health’s director-general of social care.

Ms Jones was last month forced to defend Westminster’s decision to return a four-year-old girl, known as Child B, to her parents after she had been taken into care because of domestic violence. Once back in the family home, the girl, who has cerebral palsy, was the victim of a catalogue of abuse including being repeatedly kicked in the groin, causing liver damage, having scalding water poured over her hands and being forced to eat her own faeces.

The parents, Kimberly Harte, 23, and Samuel Duncan, 27, were jailed for 11 and 10 years respectively. Sentencing them, Judge Paul Worsley QC said he had “anxieties about the way this child was returned to her parents against the express wishes of her foster carers”.

Ms Jones accepted that child protection workers should have been more questioning of the parents, who had “consistently lied to us”, and that there should have been more one-to-one contact with the girl and her siblings. But she maintained that staff had otherwise acted appropriately, having visited the family more than 20 times in the nine weeks concerned.

She disagreed publicly with Lord Laming, who led the inquiry into the killing of Victoria Climbié and who sought to link the two cases, insisting that none of the four key failings identified in the Climbié affair had been repeated in respect of Child B.

Scie was set up by the government in 2001 to improve social care services for children and adults across the UK. Ms Jones, 58, will succeed Bill Kilgallon, who is retiring. Her salary has not been disclosed but is expected to be in six figures.

Allan Bowman, who chairs the organisation, said Ms Jones was “an outstanding successor who brings a wealth of experience combined with the energy and vision that Scie demands”.

David Behan, the director-general of social care at the health department, said she was a demonstrably effective leader who would build on the foundations established by Mr Kilgallon.