The depths of Britain’s ‘worst ever’ child care crisis

In a statement that should have made us all sit up and take note, our top family judge, Lord Justice Munby, last week warned that social workers are now taking so many children into care that our “child protection” system is facing an unprecedented crisis. Since social workers’ failure to prevent the murder of “Baby P” became a major national scandal in 2008, the number of care applications has risen so fast that, by 2015, it had almost doubled, from an annual average of 6,532 to 12,781.

But this year it has rocketed up again, by a further 26 per cent, to the point where, if it continues to rise at this rate, the annual figure could within three years, according to Munby, have “climbed to 25,000”: nearly four times its pre-Baby P level. Already, despite attempts to speed up the process, the courts are becoming hopelessly overstretched, and unless something dramatic is done, the whole system could be facing complete breakdown.

Strangely, however, Munby went on to suggest that “the reasons for this are little understood”. In fact, as I have been reporting here for six years, one reason for this explosion in child-snatching is more obvious than any other; and Munby’s failure to recognise it on this occasion is particularly odd, because he himself has more than hinted at it in his own trenchant judgments as president of the Family Division since 2013.

This is that, in over-reacting to the Baby P fiasco, social workers have become astonishingly trigger-happy, removing far too many children from their parents for wholly inadequate reasons. And chilling light is shed on this by two more sets of statistics.

The first, published by the NSPCC, shows what has happened under the four legal justifications for removing children from their families. Between 2006 and 2015, cases where children were taken into care for “neglect” rose by 88 per cent, in line with the overall trend. Despite the supposed increase in concern over “physical abuse” post-Baby P, these cases rose by only 20 per cent. Cases involving sexual abuse of children scarcely rose at all, from 2,300 to 2,340.

But by far the largest increase, a staggering 278 per cent, has been in cases where it was alleged that parents were exposing their children to “emotional abuse”, a charge much more open to subjective interpretation than the others. And even this is misleading, because it makes no distinction between real emotional abuse, for which at least some evidence can be produced, and the much more speculative claim that children might be exposed to the mere “risk” of emotional abuse some time in the future.

Since 2009 I have followed in detail literally hundreds of cases where children have been taken into care for what appeared to be questionable reasons. And in the vast majority of them, as where a mother has her baby snatched from her arms in the delivery ward, or loses her children simply because she herself had been in care (and is therefore deemed unfit to bring up a child of her own), the only excuse given for removing a child is that it might face the “risk” of emotional abuse. No need to show that such abuse has actually taken place. Simply a social worker’s opinion, far too often accepted by the courts, that this might happen in the hypothetical future.

The other set of figures, produced by a University of Central Lancashire study based on Freedom of Information requests to 114 local councils, showed that, since Baby P, there has been a huge increase in the number of cases where social workers have intervened because of “concerns” raised by teachers, health visitors, doctors or members of the public that something suspicious might be going on, even if this may be only a small bruise on an arm or a neighbour overhearing a mother and father shouting at each other. Thanks to such “referrals”, according to the study, social workers investigated no fewer than one in five of all children born in 2009/10.

But again, many of the cases I have investigated over the years were set off like this, leading to tragic outcomes where social workers successfully based their case almost entirely on those initial ill-founded suspicions, without having to produce any further evidence to support them.

If Sir James Munby really wants to avert the catastrophe he warned of on Tuesday, and to restore this horrifically corrupted system to some semblance of justice, humanity and common sense – as he has shown many signs of wishing to do – he has no alternative but to identify this major cause of the problem.

The only way this immense social disaster could be halted would be to ensure that social workers and the courts return to their proper role under the law, whereby they stop tearing families apart for no good reason and concentrate just on those families where their intervention is genuinely justified.

When a bath is dangerously overflowing, the first thing one needs to do is turn off the tap.