City council criticised for failing at risk youngsters

Dundee City Council has been criticised for “major weaknesses” in identifying children in the city who need protection and for “significant delays” in protecting those at risk of emotional abuse or neglect.

Child protection inspectors from Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Education (HMIE) warned that some children were being left for too long in circumstances that placed them at risk of serious harm.

Children’s Minister Adam Ingram said services in the city were “simply not good enough.”

The report by HMIE comes a few months after the conviction of 23-year-old Robert Cunningham for the culpable homicide of toddler Brandon Muir, whose mother shared a flat with Cunningham.

The report did not look specifically at Brandon’s death, but inspectors reported three months early, at the behest of the Scottish Government, in response to the case. The 23-month-old child died from a ruptured intestine following an assault by Cunningham. During his trial it emerged the social work department had been in contact with Brandon’s mother Heather Boyd before her son’s death.

The report says that not all children identified as at risk of abuse were reported swiftly enough to social work or the police, saying: “Immediate action was sometimes delayed and some children were left in high-risk situations without adequate protection or support.

“The needs of vulnerable children and those recovering from abuse were not always met well. Staff across services … did not always report their concerns until the child’s circumstances had reached crisis point,” inspectors added.

The quality of risk assessments by the council was “very variable” – some assessments were detailed and clearly identified any risks to children but “many others lacked relevant detail and sufficient analysis of risk”.

Chief officers of relevant agencies have now been asked to prepare an action plan detailing how they will improve services, reporting back to HMIE within four months. A follow-up inspection to assess progress will take place within a year.

Mr Ingram said independent inquiries already underway would examine the death of Brandon more closely, but added that the HMIE report “plainly shows that child protection services in Dundee are simply not good enough and must be urgently improved.”

Ministers expected “robust and rapid action”, he said.

“The action plan which Dundee partners are already taking forward to improve child protection services and respond to HMIE’s findings is a solid start and is to be welcomed,” Mr Ingram said.

Both HMIE and the Scottish Government will be monitoring the situation in Dundee, he added. “We will not fail to act if child protection lessons nationally are to be learned from Brandon’s death. However it is right that we await the outcome of the independent reviews.”

Alan Baird, chair of Dundee Children and Young Persons Protection Committee and director of social work in the city, said all agencies involved accepted joint responsibility for the failings detailed in the report. “There have been gaps in our services,” he said.

He said an action plan was being drawn up and that the organisations on the child protection committee had increased resources for the task. This will include an increase in the number of frontline child protection staff in the city.

Meanwhile a child protection unit is to be set up in Dundee’s Kings Cross Hospital to allow specialists in child protection from all relevant agencies to work together, Baird said.

“There is little doubt that the proliferation of drugs in our communities has led to major challenges for agencies involved in child welfare and protection,” he added.

Recent HMIE reports have strongly criticised child protection services in both Aberdeen and Moray. In the last two years reports on those two councils, and Edinburgh and Midlothian, have all warned that children are being left in high-risk situations for too long.

Labour leader Iain Gray said that, in the wake of this “third damning report”, a national child protection inquiry should be held.

“There is a crisis at the heart of child protection services in parts of Scotland,” he said. “We were told after the death of Brandon Muir that changes would be made. I have no confidence that that is happening.”