Tears and love at Arthur vigil as ministers set up sweeping probe
MINISTERS yesterday announced a major review into the circumstances which led to the killing of six-yearold Arthur Labinjo-Hughes at the hands of his ‘evil’ father and stepmother.
Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi has separately commissioned watchdogs covering social care, health, police and probation to undertake an urgent inspection of the safeguarding agencies in Solihull, West Midlands, where Arthur was fatally attacked after months of abuse.
It came as 200 people gathered for a vigil outside the house where Arthur endured his final months.
The words ‘You are loved, Arthur’ were displayed on the boarded-up property yesterday, as balloons were released and dozens of bouquets filled the front garden. A minute’s applause was held for Arthur in the sixth minute of football matches up and down the country – including Arthur’s team Birmingham City’s fixture at Millwall.
Speaking on Friday during a campaign visit in Shropshire, the Prime Minister vowed to leave ‘absolutely no stone unturned’ to establish what went wrong over Arthur’s death.
Now the independent national review, led by the National Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel, will effectively ‘upgrade’ an existing local review which was launched shortly after Arthur’s death in June 2020.
That inquiry was paused while his father, Thomas Hughes, 29, and Hughes’s lover, Emma Tustin, 32, were prosecuted for the death. The pair were jailed for a combined total of at least 50 years last week.
Arthur – whose mother is in jail for manslaughter – had been seen by social workers during the first national coronavirus lockdown, just two months before his death. But they concluded there were ‘no safeguarding concerns’ and closed the file when Hughes declined additional ‘life story’ work to help Arthur come to terms with his family history.
Police were also alerted to the boy’s plight by a relative, but officers closed the case without fully investigating it because social services were already involved.
Arthur was starved and beaten by Hughes and Tustin, who also laced his food with salt and denied him water in a prolonged campaign of abuse.
The Joint Targeted Area Inspection at the local level will be led jointly by Ofsted, the Care Quality Commission, HM Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services, and HM Inspectorate of Probation. It will consider where improvements are needed, including how the agencies work together and share information.
Together, the local and national investigations aim to provide what the Department for Education described as a ‘deep, independent look’ at the case with the aim of ensuring such an incident did not happen again, either locally or nationally.
Arthur was left with an unsurvivable brain injury while in the sole care of Tustin, and his body was covered in 130 bruises.
Tustin was jailed for life at Coventry Crown Court on Friday, with a minimum term of 29 years, after being found guilty of his murder, while Hughes was sentenced to 21 years for manslaughter.
On Saturday the Attorney General’s Office announced that Tustin and Hughes’s sentences are to be reviewed to determine whether they were unduly lenient.
By last night, 270,000 people had signed a petition demanding whole life terms for Tustin and Hughes.
‘Everything in our power’
Mr Zahawi said he had ‘asked for a joint inspection to consider where improvements are needed by all the agencies tasked with protecting children in Solihull, so that we can be assured we are doing everything in our power to protect other children and prevent such evil crimes’.
Mr Zahawi, who is due to address the Commons on the case today, added that an overarching review was also necessary ‘given the enormity of this case’. The Sunday Times reported that the reviews will consider whether to introduce safeguarding guidelines for at-risk children if there are future national lockdowns.
Children’s Commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza said more must be done to support social workers to spot similar cases, but acknowledged that the lockdown had ‘weakened’ the system.
An NSPCC spokesman welcomed the announcement of a national review – and called for Arthur’s death to become a ‘watershed moment in which we ask ourselves difficult questions about what we can all do, nationally, locally and in our own communities, to keep children safe’.