How many more will die?

Published on Wednesday 8 February 2006 01:03

WITH great fanfare, the Executive yesterday announced what it termed the biggest reform of the Scottish social work system in 40 years.

However, we have been here several times before - to no avail. Exactly two years ago, the First Minister announced - also with great fanfare - that no child in Scotland should ever again die because of failings in social services. At that point, he unveiled a new "national framework of standards" for Scotland's child protection system, centred on promoting better co-ordination between agencies when dealing with individual cases of children at risk.

But Mr McConnell's new national framework signally failed to stop the murder of 16-year-old Karen Dewar a year later. Her killer was under supervision by the Fife social services department. The official report into Karen's death criticised "inappropriate responses to referrals, inadequacies in supervision and case management [and] failure to use all the available information to assess risk and to share assessments".

In other words, everything that we knew was going wrong in the social work system, and the very problems Mr McConnell had tried to address with his reform in 2004, had happened yet again. And so Karen Dewar joined the long list of young people in Scotland to have been murdered or abused because the child-care system proved incompetent, a list that includes Caleb Ness, Carla-Nicole Bone, Danielle Reid, Dylan Lockerbie, Kyle Metcalfe and Kennedy McFarlane.

No-one doubts the sincerity of Mr McConnell and his ministers in wishing to prevent this sad list from growing longer. However, the Executive needs to examine why it has proved difficult to implement reform in previous years, otherwise the new plan risks being stillborn as well.

One difficulty lies with the isolation of social work departments within the iron bureaucracies of local councils, which makes managerial responsiveness slow and personal motivation weak. There is a case for examining merging social services with local NHS bodies to create an independent, one-stop-shop agency.

The Executive must also provide leadership. It does not propose legislating for the new reforms until 2008. How many more Karen Dewars and Caleb Nesses will we see before then?