HOW COULD LUCY’S KILLER HAVE WORKED IN CARE?

NOT for the first time, a judge has criticised social services following the murder of a child. In this case, the victim was 13-year-old Lucy McHugh, murdered by her family’s lodger, Stephen Nicholson.

Nicholson, who is 25, took Lucy (pictured) to some woods in Southampton where he stabbed her 27 times: she had threatened to reveal that he had been sexually abusing her, so he silenced her for good.

After sentencing Nicholson to a minimum jail term of 33 years, Mrs Justice May asked how the social services — alerted by the child’s teachers to the fact that she was in an abusive ‘relationship’ with Nicholson — had failed to notice he had a history of offending since he was 14, which included trying to stab a guard while serving a sentence at a youth detention centre.

Even if they didn’t know that Nicholson had a criminal record, action should have been taken: sex with a child of 13 is statutory rape.

Admittedly, the situation was not helped by the fact that Lucy’s mother Stacey White, 31, who welcomed Nicholson into the family home as a friend of her own live-in lover, had dismissed the teachers’ concerns that her daughter was in an abusive relationship with her lodger. The mother was described as a ‘care worker’. And so, in every report of the case I have read, was Nicholson. The judge did not see fit to remark on this, and nor has anyone else. So I will, because it is extraordinary. Before anyone is taken on as a care worker, he or she is required to go through a check with the Disclosure and Barring Service, designed to reveal if the applicant has any spent or unspent convictions, or even cautions.

The DBS system was set up in the wake of the murders of two children in Soham, Cambridgeshire, by their school caretaker, Ian Huntley.

It is true that Nicholson’s victim was not someone he was paid to look after.

But how on earth could a man with such a long history of violence have ever been passed fit to work in ‘care’?

And is this a solitary aberration in the system? I fear the answer is no.