Peerage for policy chief who dropped the ball

Among those David Cameron is sending to the Lords in his controversial honours list is Camilla Cavendish, the former journalist who read PPE with him at Oxford and who was head of his policy unit for barely a year. Cavendish first made her name with a remarkable series of articles between 2006 and 2009 exposing the squalid shambles of our “child protection” system, focusing on the alarming number of cases where social workers, supported by the courts, seemed to be removing far too many children from their families for no good reason.

After winning a prestigious award for investigative journalism, Cavendish moved on from her crusade at almost exactly the time that I took up the same cause in this column.

Although she was credited with having helped to “open up” our ultrasecretive family courts to greater public scrutiny, I soon found that little had changed.

Indeed, this was also at much the same time when, in the wake of the “Baby P” furore, the number of applications to take children into care began to hurtle upwards, as they have continued to do ever since, making an ever greater mockery of the seemingly noble principles for which our present child protection system was set up by the 1989 Children Act.

Unnoticed by the media, the latest figure for applications to take children into care showed that in June this again broke the record, at 1,265: more than three times their level in 2008, and still rising so fast that the total for the three months from April was 21 per cent higher than in he same quarter last year.

Largely hidden from public view, this horribly corrupted system is giving rise to so many abuses and travesties of justice that I have long had no hesitation in describing it as one of the most disturbing social scandals of our time.

When Cavendish was appointed to run the No 10 policy unit I observed that she was now in a position to press for the kind of fundamental reform needed to end a colossal tragedy – which no one had originally done more to expose than she herself.

Alas, in the year since she took office, when she became best known for championing a “sugar tax”, there has been little sign of it.

So here lies one of the greatest challenges facing the rather more serious and socially responsible Government led by Theresa May.

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