Social worker case runs up bill for taxpayer

Taxpayers will have to foot a legal bill approaching a million pounds after the court case involving hitman-hiring social worker Lynda Barnes.

The complex family court case exposed Mrs Barnes’ criminal past and her lies under oath – and the judge hearing it was so concerned that he ordered the council chiefs who hired her to pay half the legal aid costs.

So even though the families involved in the case were receiving legal aid for challenging the council and its social workers, Judge Paul Barclay said Bath and North East Somerset Council was so liable that it should pay half their’ legal aid bill.

That is expected to pass £500,000, and B&NES will also have to pay its own legal bill – conservatively put by the council yesterday at £250,000. The full figures are yet to be calculated, but it is expected to be somewhere between three-quarters and a full one million pounds.

Yesterday, B&NES reassured its taxpayers that services would not be directly affected by the case – council chiefs had seen the possibility of a hefty legal bill coming and budgeted for it from their ‘risk reserves’ pot.

The case, which cannot be reported in detail, was a complex child protection one involving an extended family battling with B&NES social services in the family court. As well as B&NES’ own legal team, four other sets of barristers and solicitors were involved representing interested parties.

But the case became significantly more complicated when a colleague of Mrs Barnes told her bosses the social worker had lied under oath and asked her to lie too.

Judge Barclay was so appalled he investigated Mrs Barnes himself and discovered she had been sacked by B&NES’s predecessor council, Avon, after being found guilty of attempting to hire a hitman to have her husband murdered back in 1995.

Mrs Barnes, 55, appealed on her own to the High Court in London to stop an order from the judge that her name be published, and failed.

Yesterday, the council admitted the case would cost taxpayers. “The judge decided that the council should pay 50 per cent of the costs of the publicly-funded parties in this case,” said a spokesman.

“There were five parties that came within this category, represented by both senior and junior counsel for two parties and counsel for three others. Final costs have not yet been assessed. But we estimate that the amount the council will have to pay will be around £500,000.

“We estimate that our own legal costs will be around £250,000. This was a very complicated court case. The case took a significant length of time to resolve because of the number of parties involved and discoveries made by the judge about Lynda Barnes.

“The council had made provision these costs, which will be paid out of risk reserves. No services will be cut as a result of this, nor will this affect the future level of council tax.”

A legal source close to the case said B&NES’ assessment was conservative. “Once it’s all been added up, I wouldn’t be surprised if it isn’t close to a million pounds. It is relatively rare for a judge to order that one side pays anything towards the other’s legal costs in a case like this, especially when it was already the subject of legal aid.”

The council has already admitted it made mistakes in hiring Mrs Barnes, from Nailsea in Somerset, in the first place, and in the handling of the case itself. A review of 17 other cases involving a total of 31 children in which Mrs Barnes was involved has been undertaken and council chiefs are looking at whether any other disciplinary action is needed in the wake of the scandal.

An internal review of all the cases are now awaiting verification from a separate NSPCC inquiry.