Quality | 2010.04.19
The Baby P inquiry shows witch-hunts still thrive | Jenni Russell
The pressure was on Ed Balls to serve up a head to the howling crowd – and the public checks to ensure calm utterly failed
Ed Balls must be the luckiest man in politics. Just before the Easter holidays the high court permitted the release of astonishing evidence about the lengths that the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) and Ofsted had gone to in order to ensure that Balls could deliver a scapegoat to the country after the Baby P affair. The version of events we\'d been fed – that the chief responsibility for the tragedy could fairly be laid at the door of one highly incompetent and publicly vilified executive, Sharon Shoesmith – turned out to be frighteningly unreliable.
Instead, we read about pressure on Ofsted to produce the results the secretary of state required, endless rewritings of a supposedly independent report until it did exactly that, and the stunning failure of Ofsted to produce any of the evidence of this happening until the court hearings dealing with it had ended. We can\'t afford to ignore a sequence of events that suggests how easily the government can manipulate information to suit its purposes, and how responsive public servants can be to political and media demands. They can\'t be relied upon, on this evidence, to be disinterested searchers after truth and solutions when things go wrong. Some simply want to protect themselves from criticism and find someone to blame.
It is only because Shoesmith was determined to take the government to the high court to declare her sacking unfair that we have any idea of what happened behind the scenes. She lost her job in December 2008 after an emergency report by Ofsted had been highly critical of the quality of Haringey council\'s leadership and management under her. Balls had called the report "devastating", and used special powers to remove her from her post. Haringey then sacked her without compensation.
Balls was in tune with the national and media mood. Shoesmith had become a hate figure. A million and a half people had signed a Sun petition against her, and Balls had been photographed surrounded by the signatures. Before the end of the month a second independent report – Ofsted\'s annual review of Haringey\'s overall performance – was published. Whereas in the year that Baby P died Ofsted had judged Haringey to be a good authority, it now concluded there were serious failings in the way the council ran child protection. The judgments looked definitive and clear-cut.
Shoesmith went to court arguing the emergency report was unfair, that she should have been allowed to respond to its criticisms before publication, and that Balls had responded to media pressure in sacking her. As a former Ofsted inspector herself, she knew the process the organisation would have gone through. She asked to see the drafts of the report. Ofsted initially told the court these were "irrelevant and unnecessary", and then that they no longer existed. The hearing finished in October.
Days before the judge, Mr Justice Foskett, was due to give his ruling, Ofsted suddenly disclosed it had found copies of the relevant drafts. Successive versions had been discovered on an inspector\'s computer. Remarkably, although up to 16 other staff had been involved in the reports, they appear to have deleted their versions. Ofsted handed over thousands of pages of new evidence, with handwritten notes of meetings between it and officials from Balls\'s department. It apologised for a "serious and deeply regrettable mistake" in failing to disclose the documents earlier. The judge\'s ruling was immediately postponed.
The contents of the documents, as set out by Shoesmith\'s lawyers this month, are explosive. Ofsted is supposedly an independent body, reporting to parliament rather than the DCSF – yet it was called to meetings with Balls\'s top civil servant and told that it must find "definitive evidence on which the minister can act". The report had to be "clear in its judgment and attribution of responsibility". Managers were told by the DCSF that their chief inspector, Christine Gilbert, "remained in no doubt as to what Ofsted needs to do with the inspection".
Over seven days the original report was repeatedly amended, strengthening the criticisms of Shoesmith and removing initially positive judgments. In later drafts, senior Ofsted managers tightened the focus on Shoesmith by cutting sections that criticised the actions of the police and the local NHS, and inserting new passages that cast her in an unfavourable light. Inspectors who protested that the new additions were "too harsh" or "insufficiently evidenced" were ignored. At one point one of the lead inspectors told his colleagues to delete all emails relating to Haringey and Baby P. That order was rescinded, but not before material was deleted. Luckily, the proof of how Ofsted had acted survived.
Ofsted has dismissed this evidence as sound and fury, and maintains it didn\'t succumb to outside pressure, or deliberately destroy its documents. But this appears to be the second report on Haringey it has revised for political reasons. Last autumn a whistleblower produced evidence that the 2008 annual review on Haringey, which had awarded high ratings, was all but printed when the Baby P furore blew up. It was hastily withdrawn and rewritten, to mark the council as inadequate in key areas. The whistleblower said the intention was not to understand what had happened, or to improve Haringey\'s performance, but to save Ofsted embarrassment.
On this showing, Balls, the DCSF and Ofsted have all acted shamelessly. Balls wanted to deliver a head to the howling crowd, the DCSF was prepared to act as his envoy, and Ofsted didn\'t dare to uphold its independence by telling the secretary of state to get lost. The cool analysis we might have thought we could count on from an impartial, expert inquiry turns out to be nothing of the sort. Which means we can\'t be sure what was going wrong in Haringey, or whether Shoesmith deserved to lose her job.
The judge will rule on Shoesmith\'s appeal shortly. Whatever his conclusions on her case, what we have already heard shows that Britain, which prides itself on its sophistication and its divisions of powers, can now find itself in thrall to its basest instincts. We claim to be rational. That\'s why we measure success in our services by what we can count and target; that\'s why public servants spend their time ticking boxes. But as soon as something goes tragically wrong, it turns out that these elaborate processes are easily subverted; all that\'s wanted is someone to blame. It\'s as sophisticated as 16th-century witch-hunting, and just as effective at solving problems.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]13/baby-p-case-good-witch-hunt
