We’ll publish Shannon Matthews care report in full, pledge Tories

The Conservatives pledged last night that an incoming Tory government would publish the full report into social workers’ disastrous dealings with the family of Shannon Matthews, the kidnapped schoolgirl who was drugged and held captive for 25 days by an accomplice of her mother.

Michael Gove, the shadow children’s secretary, promised full transparency in the notorious case of the nine-year-old as further criticism was made of the published report into care agencies’ involvement with the brothers convicted of torturing children in Edlington, South Yorkshire.

Meanwhile, Sue Berelowitz, the Deputy Children’s Commissioner for England, said the published Edlington report failed to address key questions arising from the case. She attacked Ofsted for grading it as “good” and questioned whether the agency “can effectively inspect children’s care”.

It was announced on Tuesday that Baroness Scotland, the Attorney-General, is to review the sentences handed down last week to the Edlington boys, who were aged 10 and 11 in April last year when they beat, sexually assaulted, burnt and tried to strangle two children before leaving them for dead.

The brothers, who received indefinite sentences, were told that they must spend at least five years in detention and will only be released if they are no longer a danger to the public. If it is decided that the punishment was unduly lenient, the case will be referred to the Court of Appeal.

David Cameron has said that under a future Conservative Government all serious case reviews — which are held after a child known to social services dies, suffers serious injury or is involved in violent crime — will be published in full, except for information that would identify surviving children and their families.

The Tories also promised retrospectively to reveal the full reports from both the Edlington inquiry — a 150-page report, of which only a nine-page summary was published and which included less than three pages with details of the case — and the 2007 Baby P tragedy in Haringey.

To that list can now be added the case of Shannon, who was abducted in February 2008 as she walked home from a primary school in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, prompting one of the biggest search operations in the history of British policing.

After 25 days, she was found at a flat one mile from her home, hidden in the base of a divan bed with the uncle of her mother’s boyfriend, Michael Donovan. He and Shannon’s mother, Karen Matthews, were jointly convicted of kidnapping, false imprisonment and perverting the course of justice.

Matthews made tearful public pleas for her daughter’s safe return while secretly plotting to share a £50,000 reward when Shannon was found. It later emerged that the child had been taken off the child protection register before her abduction when social services — after a long history of involvement with the mother, who had seven children by five fathers — decided that she was no longer at risk of serious harm.

Concerns about the children’s welfare were raised by neighbours and local schools, and a psychological report highlighted Matthews’ “inability to successfully place her children’s needs above her own”, but they had continued to live with their mother despite reports of violence in the home and squalid living conditions.

Kirklees Safeguarding Children Board, which under Government pressure commissioned a serious case review in December 2008, nine months after Shannon was rescued, has not made public its summary of the findings. It has blamed the delay — reviews are supposed to be completed within six months — on the “scale and complexity of the work” and has given no target date for publication.

Whether or not the report is completed before the general election, those overseeing it face the certainty that in the event of a Tory victory far more details of the findings — and of the role played by social services, health workers and other agencies — will be made public than were originally anticipated.

Ms Berelowitz, spoke of her concern about the inadequacy of the information provided in the published summary of the Edlington serious case review She told Times Online that it contained “glaring” omissions, did not properly address why care authorities failed to take action that might have prevented the attack and lacked sufficient detail “for people to understand the gravity of the situation”.

She said she would be writing to ask Ofsted why it graded the review as “good”, given the inspection agency’s failure to insist that the published version “got to the heart of the fundamental questions”.

An Ofsted spokeswoman said last night that it stood by the grading, which was based on “the quality of the review itself” and was not a verdict on the published summary. “The debate about whether or not reviews should be published is a matter for Government, not for Ofsted,” she said.

Mr Gove said the intervention of the Deputy Children’s Commissioner showed that “the case for keeping secret the details of what went wrong collapses even further as every day passes”.

“Now we have the Government’s own children’s tsar saying that the two-and-a-half page summary is flawed. Gordon Brown and Ed Balls need to stop ignoring the growing body of expert and public opinion about how we can best protect vulnerable children. We need the full details of these investigations to be published,” he said.

The Attorney-General’s review of the the Edlington brothers’ sentence follows a request from children’s organisations, including Kidscape and Phoenix Survivors. Her decision is expected within a fortnight.