Ed Balls moved swiftly to remove Sharon Shoesmith from her post, and states that every local council must learn the lessons of Baby P’s death. But in many ways, Shoesmith was the perfect children’s director for the new-look Department for Children, Schools and Families.

Since 2004 two of the goals set by the department have been to reduce the number of children subject to formal or legal protection by the courts. The numbers of children in care and on the child protection register had to come down. And they did.

Last December, four months after Baby P’s death, an Ofsted report praised Shoesmith’s regime for this dangerous achievement. To any childcare lawyer or judge it does not seem credible that in December 2006, social workers could hand the nine-month-old to a young friend of his mother’s, when a paediatrician and police had decided that his head injury and bruising were suspicious. They allowed him to drift home after a few weeks because the police were unable to identify the perpetrator and charge anyone with a crime.

Baby P should have been the subject of a legal planning meeting between social workers and a local authority solicitor. An application for an interim care order should have been made to the family proceedings court. A judge or magistrates would then have been asked to decide if he should go home or not, including Baby P’s court-appointed guardian. But not only was Baby P not offered the protection of the court and a guardian, the social workers did not seek legal advice until July 2007. How could this have happened?

In 2004 Every Child Matters, a very important Green Paper, was published. The aim was to provide for all children by joining up services provided by education, health and social services. The focus was to be on early prevention and intervention. These services have failed to materialise.

The one clear effect has been to raise the threshold of risk to frightening levels before social workers will take legal action. The Department for Children, Schools and Families and the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) have ignored repeatedly the serious impact this policy has had on children at risk.

These were the national findings of the Commission for Social Care Inspection (CSCI) from 2004-07: “Access to family support for many families in need is severely restricted. Families in considerable distress on the threshold of family breakdown and serious harm are not getting the sustained support they need. Some services operate inappropriately high thresholds in responding to child protection concerns and taking action to protect children . . .” This warning went unheeded. In April last year responsibility for inspecting children’s social services was taken away from CSCI and handed over to Ofsted, diluting expertise and marginalising the role of in-depth inspection in child protection.

In the summer of 2007 a procedure for care proceedings, called the Public Law Outline or PLO, was piloted. It was designed by senior family judges with the intention of reducing delay in court proceedings by ensuring that social workers had assessed the family thoroughly before going to court.

However, it placed burdens on local authority social workers and lawyers for which they were completely unprepared. Social services departments had neither the people nor the resources to carry out the in-depth pre-action assessments required. They took fewer and fewer cases to court.

Last March the MoJ published findings of government research into care proceedings brought in 24 different courts in 2004. The conclusions were unequivocal: “There is no evidence that local authorities bring care proceedings without good reason . . . The expectations of local authority practice in preparation for care proceedings under the PLO far exceed what was undertaken or could have been undertaken before action to protect the child in most of the sample cases.”

On the first page of the summary of the research, led by Professor Judith Masson, there is an MoJ disclaimer: “The views expressed in this research summary are those of the author, not necessarily those for the Ministry of Justice (nor do they reflect government policy).” On April 1, with no attempt to evaluate its impact on child protection, the MoJ and the Department for Children, Schools and Families launched the PLO nationwide.

In May the ministry increased the court issue fee for care proceedings from £150 to £4,000. Five issue fees could pay for a family support worker for a year. Ten could pay for a senior inner city social worker. Ministers and the Association of Directors of Children’s Social Services repeated their bland assurances that this would not affect the protection of children, because local authorities still had a statutory duty to issue care proceedings. There was a further immediate drop in care proceedings.

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