Old habits linger on at Haringey Council as Labour block Baby P debate

This morning’s newspapers brought the news that the head of Ofsted is accusing Haringey Council of misleading her inspectors:

Ofsted’s assessment of local authorities’ children’s services last year consisted of a checklist of the information managers had to provide to demonstrate, among other things, that they had adequate social workers and were assessing children promptly. Managers in Haringey misled Ofsted by providing inaccurate data, the chief inspector said.

Tactics used by the council included claims that managers had assessed children promptly when the files revealed that those assessments were in fact incomplete. The same files showed that such assessments of children were routinely and wrongly made with their parent or guardian in the room, when they could have been the ones harming them.

It wasn’t until inspectors in this week’s review [caused by the death of Baby P] began pulling children’s files from the office shelves in the town hall that they realised the extent of the deceit.

This culture of complacency and evasion still very much lives in Haringey with the news that Labour in Haringey is refusing to hold a council debate on the report Ed Balls ordered:

A special meeting next Tuesday will currently only include the formal appointment of a new Leader of the Council and Children’s Services member after the resignations on Monday. Requests by opposition councillors for a statement and discussion on the damning report have been rejected…

The Liberal Democrat opposition says that Haringey is slipping into a disastrous ‘business-as usual’ amnesia over the case. Cllr Robert Gorrie points out that only last week, the acting Leader of the Council, Lorna Reith, had defended the now removed Labour councillors Liz Santry and George Meehan, by saying she had “seen how effective they had been”…

Liberal Democrat Leader Robert Gorrie comments: “There is immense anger that Labour are already showing signs of business as usual. It is extraordinary that Haringey Council’s leadership and its Chief Executive are actively avoiding the opportunity to set out a clear plan of action in response to the devastating Ofsted report. Their behaviour sets the culture and context for council officers in the future, and the first signs are not encouraging that the necessary root and branch changes necessary will be made to the services that protect our most vulnerable citizens.”

It’s a good example of why I think people such as Angela Neustatter are very wrong in their criticism of the general public outcry against Haringey. Whilst some of it has been distasteful and wrong, her complaint earlier this week in The Guardian that, “it is appropriate when people fail in their jobs that they may be quietly removed. But discreet is not what the media likes on these occasions,” misses the point.

Quiet acceptance of responsibility and removal of people from post isn’t what Haringey does.

It isn’t what it did after the Victoria Climbie tragedy – where only the most junior of staff were scapegoated, with everyone else getting off scot-free despite Lord Laming’s damning conclusions that senior staff and management had failed. And it isn’t what Haringey Labour wanted to do this time – with their initial insistence that no councillor should take responsibility, no senior staff should go and that nothing serious had been done wrong by any of them. Left to their own devices, Haringey Labour would have seen all the blame heaped on a handful of junior staff. Public pressure and intervention of Ed Balls were crucial to stopping that.