Bureaucracy kills. According to Haringey Council, the decision to send Baby P home - to undergo six months of unspeakable torture ending in a painful death – was made at a ‘multi-agency meeting.’ The entire child protection structure post-Climbie is designed on a ‘multi-disciplinary’ model. The theory is that if all the public agencies with a role in child protection (social services, health, education, police) are brought together to make decisions, the right outcome will be reached. However, it’s just as likely that the wrong outcome will be arrived at, as in Baby P’s case, because the ‘partnership’ structure dilutes accountability. Everyone – and no-one – is to blame. Or as the DCSF puts it:
"The pitfall to watch out for is 'collaborative inertia', in which the process of integration actually gets in the way of effective service delivery, leading to negligible outputs and slow, often painful, progress."
There are so many things wrong with the current structure I won’t attempt to list them here; I have written extensively on the subject for the Centre for Policy Studies and (on a case dismaying similar to Baby P) in the Sunday Times.
All I will say is this: the death of Baby P is the bleakest indictment yet of the colossal and expensive failure of Every Child Matters, so often trumpeted by this government as evidence of Labour compassion.
