Most liked posts in thread: Star Hobson

There's a lot to cover between those two posts but I'll try to get the 'political' bits out of the way first because it's not that interesting and in general I agree with you more than you'd usually think,

The comment about defunding the service was deeply tongue in cheek in response to the post likening the impossibility of stopping a child being harmed after 5 referrals, etc, etc with a random burglary. If it is truly so impossible then why bother? The truth of course is that it isn't as imossible as stopping a burglary as you correctly point out, they do it often.

In terms of the funding even in my usual 'small government' viewpoint I completely agree that child protection of this nature the job of government whether local or national. In some respects I'd put the necessity for it to be properly funded above that of even the NHS - I just don't actually know what 'properly funded' means in pounds and pence. I see the reference to £17m and £31m in that Guardian article and I actually think "That sounds like a lot" but I'll freely accept I don't know how much it should be.

To be honest I should have know you'd have said "Whatever they spent in the 80s" but what does that mean in £££? I sometimes get the impression that if they spent £20m you'd say £30m, if it was £30m you'd say £40m, etc, etc, but what is actually enough?

Even accepting that they should be better funded there are a number of different aspects alongside that. For such crucial role I would want the department run with a 'start up' mentality. Organised, disciplined, structured, agile and passionate. Everything I've heard about the Bradford servies is the exact opposite and that doesn't always come down to money.

Fully agree and backs up my point about issues being money related but also wider than money, In some respects competing purely financially when all the money comes out of the same pot is false economy though - especially for people who are viewed as higher paid - unless there is an over supply of good case workers, which I don't think there is.

If you spend £17m on 'overpaid' agency staff how much do you actually need for it to become attractive or are they just structurally stuck in going for the lowest common dominator. i'm glad we agree that it's clear that Bradford is getting sub-par employees and needs to improve.

And now we get to the crux. You say you're not exonerating the workers but you already have several times in this thread. You've even assumed they are inexperienced for some reason without even knowing who was working on the case.

So let's just set out some relatively simple facts that have been widely reported.

• Star's great-grandmother had to look after her for 10 weeks
• Unintelligent mother (IQ under 70) living part time with controlling, aggressive partner with no blood ties to the child and a history of violence.
• 5 Separate referrals in a year. Coming from reputable sources in friends and family.
• All of them acted upon including 7 visits with one even the same day as the referral was received
• On the 3rd referral Social Services made an unannounced visit and saw multiple bruises themselves
• There were pictures and videos of injuries that led to two of the other referrals
• Star had a medical examination at BRI
• The poor thing had suffered a broken leg caused by "very considerable force" around two to four weeks before her death. She died 15 days after the last referral was closed.
• She had a ‘crazy paving’ style fracture to the back of the skull caused days before her death

There were no 'rumours' the injuries were seen both live and on media. By Social workers and medical professionals

Now you say 'inexperienced' but I look at that as a layman with not a single day's training and think automatically "This child is in immediate danger". I would be pretty confident you could put the scenario in a GCSE Health and Social paper and pretty much any student would say action needs to be taken,

How "inexperienced" do the people in the referrals need to be where their reaction to this is "Nah, do you know what, I reckon everything is cool there, let's close our files"?

Don't let your feeling on funding generally mask the absolutely shameful procedures followed on this particular case, To do so would put multiple other children who could be in similar scenarios at risk,

 

Part of the problem is an obsession with university educated staff, They go from college to university and then in to the field with no life training, If we attracted more older people who had life training as mothers and fathers and bringing up children rather than getting a tick in a box am sure things would improve with appropriate training rather than a university qualification

 

As usual those responsible will close ranks along with the investigators blaming workload and money and of course the report will end with popular phrase loved by those in power and responsible that "Lessons will be learnt"
Until the next one that is,

 

This independent trust thing will make sweet feck all difference. As it hasn't in several of the other areas in which it's been tried.
From what I understand , most Bradford child protection teams are understaffed, and those who are there are mostly short term agency staff and newly qualifieds just out of university. The teams are overworked and chronically short of expertise. Support services, to assist keeping kids out of care, are a pale shadow of what they used to be - thanks for abolishing Sure Start, Mr Cameron.
The cuts have also left social workers' wages below those of many other regional local authorities. Add in the constant demand caused by terrible social conditions in Bradford and the pressure of the job becomes unbearable.
So who is going to want to come here? There's a national shortage of qualified child protection social workers, so people can pick and choose once they've got their probationary period out of the way. Unless they're prepared to increase the team sizes, so that workers' caseloads are manageable, and pay premium wages to attract good experienced SWs & team managers then it's all just shuffling deckchairs on the Titanic. And where's the money coming from to do that? What other directorate's services are they going to cut to increase the budget of what is already the biggest bottomless pit in the council?

 

I know you don't mean it like this but it almost seems like you're advocating a 'reasonable risk of death' as being the cut of point? That can't be right surely.

But I agree with the last part which is why training and retaining is surely so key.

I don't know. From what I've heard in this case if they've tried to make the process efficient then they've certainly failed. The whole thing sounds like a hotchpotch of different working practices, archaic working systems and just generally an organisational mess. Surely that would also help.

I don't think you're talking about profilogacy at all but I don't think on it's own it solves the issue. Firstly because as we've said it moves the poor social workers around so the answer isn't to pay more locally to cause no greater benefit regionally/nationally. To me you have to raise the standard generally.

But secondly, and maybe this is my private sector head taking over. If you have working practices that are inefficient and disorganised and just add more money to these poorly managed areas you increase the inefficiency without solving the underlying issues. You're still disorganised, you've still got the bottom end of the barrel who choose to work in Bradford rather than Leeds in poorer conditions....you're just spending more. To me first step is to improve the process so it's the best it can be and then when you're at peak efficiency then increase the spending. That way every extra pound actually gets spent on what it is supposed to be going towards rather than still propping up the same people doing the same shoddy job.

We're going onto more general points here which isn't really fair in a thread that pinpointed on one poor kid but can we at least agree that given the facts we know about this case there is no financial excuse for failing to spot the multitude of red flags?

 

Apparently had 2 cardiac arrests whilst on remand let’s hope for a 3rd and they turn a blind eye to her for about 2hrs

 

The irony here is Brockhill has more protection now from the authorities than the poor little kid did.

 

Bradford Children's and Social services should be disbanded and Government appointed experts brought in to run and then train new staff, In the meantime the Chief Exec who is obviously not up to running the council should be sacked

 

Following up @Hulmebantam point, what rights do social workers and the police have to check on these vulnerable children if their families are shielding them from inspection?

If the children are not at home for house visits can you bring in the family/lovers/scrotes to the local station and withhold benefits etc until the state is satisfied in the child's safety?
Or is that considered too draconian.
Teachers are asked to be on the look-out for signs of physical/mental abuse as well as trying to educate.

 

Which is why I also referred to systems and processes as well individual error and yes there does appear to be a deep seated problem.

However, there are consequences to reducing funding to Children's Services.

 

Do you have any idea about the systems and processes that ultimately failed her? Do you know the actual issues that led to this awful thing happening?

I agree with you that it was 'incompetence', and that is unforgivable. But what incompetence? What information was received? By who? Where was it recorded? What capability does that system or process have to aggregate and flag issues? Where does this information go? What communications were sent? How?

Similarly, to dismiss time and resource as an issue appears premature. If demand exceeds supply, then something has to give.

I'll leave it at that, because I genuinely do not want to be disrespectful to the poor girl.

 

Yes, my kids mum works with severely underprivileged kids so I get more insight in to systems and processes than I would sometimes actually like.

5 referrals from close family and friends with no actual action isn't a funding problem or a process problem. It's simply a failing somewhere in the chain of people who should have acted and didn't. This isn't a demand exceeding supply issue. She didn't fall through the cracks. People went to see her and they made the wrong calls.

Funding for social services is a valid subject, it's just not valid in this case. To solve the issues they need to get to the heart of what actually occurred not just the generic and glib "more money solves all". As you say the poor kid deserves for the actual issues to get solved, not ones that aren't related to her.

 

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I basically agree with the article in which it provides a number of reasons for the failings but as usual it just always come back to money and it's not good enough. Throwing more money at a poorly organised an chaotic department doesnt solve the issues.

Should these vital services get more money? Yes. Should the people who choose to work in these areas be called out when they mess up so catastrophically. Also yes. But some people only want to see one side of that coin. Basically the perception of being "underfunded" gives carte blance to be incompetent and that's not right.

I can't get out of my head that there were 5 referrals in this case. All investigated (one on the actual same day) and subsequently closed. That to me doesn't sound like a workload issue, it sounds like simply poor investigations and decision making.

Just because you and people of a similar mindset want every single public services to be given more and more money let's not make excuses and assumptions when people clearly don't do just an important job well.

 

Maybe the service should be outsourced where improved performance and standards can be enforced and placed out of local government bungling and incompetence, Most council services that have been outsourced have been cheaper and provided better performance.
The comment " We will learn from our mistakes " should be the councils motto and tattooed on every managers hand

 

Like the LEA, which was outsourced to Serco by the Tories and had to be brought back in-house after three years because it was performing so disastrously.

 

A slightly different article from the one that says the council spent "just" £17.4m on agency staff last year.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/dec/14/star-hobson-killing-timeline

I suppose my question really is how much do we have to spend on the service before a kid who is perpetually covered in bruises, has been referred by friends and family 7 times, visited immediately following these referrals 4 times and lives with a self -named local psycho with a history of violence is properly investigated?

Are we talking £50m before these obviously tricky signs of abuse are spotted? £100m? Is there any amount of money we could spend that would make people responsible for the standard of work that has been done?

 

The answer to that is no, not really. The usual stick answer to heinous crimes like this is 'lessons will be learned' when in all honestly there is little social services can do. Damned if they do damned if they don't. I do find it disturbing though that there is more effort put in place to now protect Savannah Brockhill from harm then there ever was to protect Star Hobson from her eventual demise.

 

I don't really care about Brockhill or what she costs to be honest.

All I really care about is that there isn't more Star's out there and won't be in the future. I read the notes of the case and see a chaotic, inefficient and ineffective system with some really terrible decision making running through it. She didn't get caught in a backlog of work, she didn't wait weeks for a visit, she didn't slip through the net. She was seen, she was assessed and despite the absolutely obviously red flags her case was closed multiple times.

I think that reflects poor decision making. It seems others believe it's a lack of money. Either way I don't care as long as it doesn't happen again so how much money do we need to spend before people who make poor decisions can actually be held accountable? If there's a certain sum of money that guarantees it then we should pay it.

 

It goes without saying that the 2 people involved are fundamentally to blame. That doesn't help to stop it happening again.

Yep. 100% agree that the system need overhauling. The other part goes back to my original question though, if they truly spent £17m on agency workers as the Guardian claim (I have doubts) then what actually is "properly funded" or is it just one of those things that will always be more, more, more?