Spending cuts raise risk of new Baby P tragedy, says academic

The risk of further tragedies like the Baby P case and the murder of two French students in New Cross will be heightened because of government spending cuts, a London academic said today.

Dr Wendy Fitzgibbon warns in a new book that reduced spending on social services and probation will lead to weaker child protection and less effective monitoring of freed offenders.

She says plans to let private firms take over probation work and to deploy volunteers to help social workers protect vulnerable children will increase risks.

Her book also highlights community breakdown and the “collapse of work” in traditional working class areas as further problems, along with the growth of a “fantasy” consumer culture.

The book, Probation And Social Work On Trial, studies the death of baby Peter Connelly in Haringey in 2007 and the 2008 murder of students Gabriel Ferez and Laurent Bonomo in New Cross as part of an analysis of the way violent offenders and child abusers are dealt with.

Peter died aged 17 months after abuse by his mother Tracey Connelly, her boyfriend Steven Barker and her lodger Jason Owen.

The Frenchmen were stabbed more than 200 times at their bedsit by Dano Sonnex, a freed offender who should have been in custody, and accomplice Nigel Farmer.

Dr Fitzgibbon, a senior lecturer in criminilogy at London Metropolitan University, said reforms now planned by the Government involve “massive reductions in public spending in social services and criminal justice” – which will affect most severely “those social groups most at risk of committing child abuse or violent offences”.

“Because the whole thing will be outsourced to the unskilled private and voluntary sectors, Baby P and Sonnex are more likely to happen in future,” she added. “One only has to imagine someone like Sonnex being managed by a private security firm – a recipe for disaster.”

Ministers insist that their plans to let private firms take over some probation work will improve public protection and offender rehabilitation and that cuts to spending and the use of voluntary groups to help families with vulnerable children will not lead to weaker child protection.