Our head of Adult services used to head up collection of bins, his deputy was an OT. Neither of them have relevant qualifications or experience but they follow the new Labour agenda come what may.

Head of Childrens services is also an educationalist with no Child Protection experience but at least he has appointed someone as deputy who has.

They would buy a dictionary in Darlington where I am but their challenge would then be to find words of more than 4 letters they wish to spell!

When a complaint was made against our guy, his wife, a former Secretary appointed by him as head of Complaints ‘investigated’; strangely found he had done nothing and cut and pasted the report from a junior officer’s investigation, but failed to notice the typos and misspellings!

It resembled a badly drawn up ‘ransom’ note; appropriate really in the corrupt circumstances!

New Labour – new corruption!

Keep up the good work, Lynne

Chris Close
Independent Advocate
http://www.a-i-darlo.com

As a senior Children’s Services manager none of the Haringey mess is a surprise. I’ve worked in situations where there is denial and obfuscation. I’ve seen useless senior people take salaries for doing nothing. The quality of leadership of Children;’s Services is as bad as the leadership of schools was a few years ago.

There is no adequate performance management, systems are amateurish, leadership from the top is exceptionally poor. The pool from which leaders are chosen is very dry with only mediocre people available. The incompetent appoint the incompetent – it is a club reinforcing the ineptitude.

There is a current case in Southwark where a baby died because the single mother was being communicated with in writing only. The Mother could not read and constantly missed checks with health VisitorsSocial Care profesionals were not on the job. The baby died because of neglect and harm.

In Plymouth there are serious failings and weaknesses with a DCS – just like Shoesmith who is detached and completely off the case. Next door to Plymouth in Torbay – the systems are falling apart and there is a history of ineptitude.

Please keep up your campaigning and get your colleagues to focus on every LA.

What emerged in Haringey(and which must be confusing for people not involved with Social Care) is that on the surface, even after Baby P’s death, Haringey was receiving ‘good’ reports from it Inspectors.

For those of us involved with Adult and Children’s services however, this was all too understandable albeit lamentable.

Haringey received their ‘good’ rating based largely on the ‘evidence’ presented by Mme Shoesmith and her staff rather than by direct physical inspection.

This form of ‘self assessment is all too common and all too easy for failing managers to take advantage of to “massage” their own actions making them look better than they deserve.

So now we know how delusional and deceptive that ‘assessment’ was, can we trust other departments up and down the Country to carry out similar ‘white washing’ exercises when some of our most vulnerable people/children’s lives are at risk?

Well by and large, yes we probably can so long as there are meaningful and robust ‘partnership’ arrangements and we do not have situations which have arisen even in places like Darlington, where Complaints against the Head of Adult Services(who like Mme. Shoesmith has no qualifications or experience in Care), were left to be dealt with by his Wife are not left unchallenged.

Having your Wife carry out a purported investigation into a Complaint about your own actions equates in our view to the Hackney situation although thankfully without the same dire consequences.

The process was wrong and it is only lucky that the complaint only ended in potential negligence rather than actual harm.

Process and probity demands that all of the monitoring of services is open, robust and has no ‘apparency’ of bias or there may well be repeats of Baby P’s case up and down the Country.

We all sincerely hope that will not be the case but Councils need to get their acts together now before it is too late and begin listening rather than bullying people in local areas before it is too late.

Until we give some proper ‘teeth’ to inspectors and enable them to have the ability to directly inspect, Haringey’s are waiting to happen up and down the Country.