till they come, those official reports on the grotesque failings of our “child protection” system. Last week we had another on the failure of Greater Manchester police to heed all the warnings they were given about the abuse of children in “care” in Rochdale (for which no senior officers were asked to resign). From the coverage given to the more wide-ranging inquiry into the workings of our child care system by Sir Michael Wilshaw, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Children’s Services, it might have seemed that this was yet another critical report, as it highlighted Ofsted’s findings that more than three quarters of the local authority children’s services departments it inspected were either “inadequate” (its lowest rating) or “requiring improvement”.

But a clue as to why the report itself then seemed so strangely thin lay in those Sir Michael consulted for his report. These ranged from local authorities themselves to the adoption and fostering agencies which preside, very profitably, over the record numbers of children now being taken into “care”, at an annual cost of £3.7 billion. Every one of these bodies was part of the official system itself. Sir Michael doesn’t seem to have spoken to any of the system’s critics, let alone to any of those grieving parents or children suffering in “care” who feel that it has horribly betrayed them.

Unsurprisingly, when Ofsted’s director of social care was given a limp little interview by John Humphrys on the Today programme, her only message was that too many children “are not being taken into the care system when they need to be”. In fact, nothing is more disturbing about this system, as we saw in Rochdale and Rotherham, than the way, once children are taken into “care”, their cries for help when they are abused are ruthlessly ignored. Yet the slightest hint given by a teacher or doctor that a child might possibly have been “non-accidentally” injured by a parent can have social workers and police rushing round to remove the child into the very system where they may suffer genuine illtreatment far worse than anything alleged against their parents. So this inhumane system rolls autistically on, determined to resist any real recognition of just how grievously it has gone off the rails.