The Baby P case has been treated dismally by politicians

Ed Balls created a spectacular crisis in children’s social care, and now the coalition has done a curious U-turn

In opposition, politicians demand more openness when it comes to child protection tragedies. By the time they are in government, as it became clear today, they want “closure”. And well they might, because the longer the seemingly interminable Baby P saga continues, the more the politicians involved appear opportunistic.

The coalition’s publication of the two Baby Peter serious case reviews (SCRs) is on the face of it an exercise in transparency and openness, and as ministers put it, an attempt to achieve “closure”. They add interesting detail, and in places they describe well the frightening complexity and difficulty of child protection work. But in truth they tell us little we didn’t already know about the events leading to Peter Connelly’s death, not least that his death was avoidable, and that errors by doctors and police officers – emphatically not just social workers – were in different ways responsible.

Today’s headlines tell us that “every agency” involved in the case messed up, which is actually not news to anyone who has taken a close interest in the case over the past two years. It may be a surprise, however, to anyone who had been led to believe by the reports of the Sun newspaper or the actions of former children’s secretary Ed Balls that the blame for the tragedy lay solely at the feet of hapless social workers and the sacked former Haringey children’s director, Sharon Shoesmith.

What’s curious is that the first SCR, written under the auspices of Shoesmith, comes to the same conclusion about the culpability of the various Haringey safeguarding agencies, from Great Ormond Street hospital to the Metropolitan police. Whitehall officials had seen the full SCR when it was completed in October 2008, and had not raised any objections to its findings. Michael Gove, who as shadow children’s secretary back in December 2008 was one of only a handful of the people allowed to read Shoesmith’s full SCR, declared it to be a “manual for how to improve children’s services”.

He demanded it be made public because:

    “Because [it] reveals, in narrative detail, precisely what went wrong. Anyone reading that document can draw appropriate lessons about how social workers, lawyers, policemen and doctors should do their job better. It is a manual for how to improve children’s services in a case like this.”

This raises the question why Balls, along with a compliant Ofsted, declared the first SCR to be inadequate, and ordered a second “official” SCR to be written. This second report, at least in summary form, reframed Peter’s death as essentially a failure of social work practice, and largely ignored the failings of the police and health services. Why did Balls work so hard to discredit the first SCR? It is easy to suspect that Balls was anxious to justify his sacking of Shoesmith, and distract attention from difficulties with Labour’s child protection reforms, which were supposed to prevent the very inter-agency failings that the SCR described.

Even more curious is why the coalition has also now U-turned and discredited the first SCR. Gove’s eager endorsement of Shoesmith’s “child protection manual” has become, in the words of children’s minister Tim Loughton this morning, a “complacent” piece of work, that is “insufficiently critical and sufficiently thorough” The Liberal Democrats were suspicious of the first SCR and have persistently called for a full public inquiry, a course of action about which they are now mysteriously silent. Politicians say they want openness and understanding, except when it suits them.

But then behaviour of politicians in this case has been dismal, right from the start. It was David Cameron, whose cynical prime minster’s question time intervention on Baby Peter in November 2008 set the frenzied and hysterical political tone of the ensuing debate. Balls’s clumsy handling of the case, and the botched sacking of Shoesmith, created a spectacular (and avoidable) ongoing crisis in children’s social care that has seen thousands of children taken into care and cost hundreds of millions of pounds, with no discernible evidence that at-risk children are any safer or better off.

Loughton declared this morning:

    “This isn’t about a blame game, it’s about trying to achieve some degree of closure. This has been in the headlines for most of the last two years. I think it will be in everybody’s interests, for the family tragically involved and for the professionals involved in this borough and beyond, if we can learn these lessons, achieve some degree of closure and move on.”

In these cases, its safeguarding professionals who are invariably asked to “lean lessons”. But given the epic mismanagement of the Baby P fallout, perhaps we should be asking, not for closure but what politicians can learn and do better.

Shoesmith, who may return to the courts soon to appeal her dismissal, famously declared in a Guardian interview that the actions of Balls had created “a local tragedy and a national catastrophe”. That is precisely what has happened, and may happen again.