Serious Case Reviews – Publication (4 of 9)

The Reports - Publication

The full Serious Case Review reports are never made public, only the Executive Summary. As a result councillors have to take the Summaries on trust. I find that inadequate. That's not about distrusting our officers, it's about confidence in the system. Confidence, that we have identified what went wrong and that we know what we need to do to put it right. I am not sure that these reports give us that.

The first big issue is the considerable delay in publishing these reports, why they were published when they were and why they were published together. These children died in 2007 & 2008. A clue to how long they have been around is in the anonymisation. Child A was Aaron Gilbert (who died in 2005) – these three reports are for Child B, D & E. (Child C has not been published for reasons that, in the information I have been given, I entirely accept as valid). I accept that where criminal prosecution is likely/pending or the judicial process is in train, it could be difficult to publish certain information. However, of these three specific cases, only one gave rise to criminal proceedings (Child B - Carly). Although it seems certain that proceedings would have been considered in Child D (Kyle), in the third case (Child E – Chloe) they don't seem relevant at all.

So a more reasonable publication order would have been E (Chloe), almost immediately after her death in 2008, followed by D (Kyle) after decisions had been taken on proceedings, and finally Child B (Carly, who had died in early 2007) after the whole judicial procedure, including appeals, had been dispensed with. But no, the three reports were published together in March 2010. No satisfactory explanation has been given for this. Council was told that the reports were only finalised the day before publication. That is entirely unconvincing.

Why then were they all published together? Council was assured that this was just a co-incidence. Again, unconvincing.

I know that the Authority was expecting to get major headlines and the national news with at least one of the cases. So was it 'managing' the release to mitigate the damage? Well, it would be surprising if it didn't, but again Council was told that wasn't the case. Did the Authority want them out of the way before what they hoped was a good (or at least not too bad) CSSIW report? Again, that would not be unreasonable. Again Council was told that was not the case. What role did CSSIW have in governing the publication date? The Chief Inspector's dissembling and rather ill-tempered responses to my questions on this subject at Council, just created more suspicion – whether it is warranted or not I simply have no idea. What is clear is that what was always going to be a difficult period for the Authority was made worse by the way it was handled. The Authority probably couldn't believe its luck when Birmingham published just before Swansea and captured all the headlines. Or was that known? And was it that that dictated the publication date? We have still to get to the bottom of all of this.