The head of a leading UK children’s charity has said that more children should be taken aware from their parents at birth to prevent them being brought up in “completely broken” families.
Martin Narey, the chief executive of the charity Barnardo’s, said that social workers try “too hard” to keep children with their biological parents rather than taking them into care where their needs might be better addressed.
His remarks come after criticism of the failure of social services to intervene in the case of two young boys who beat, tortured and sexually abused two other boys in South Yorkshire. The case came in the wake of a number of other child abuse cases in the UK, including the Baby P case.
An inquiry is under way into how the brothers, aged 10 and 12, were left free to lure their victims to an isolated spot outside Edlington, near Doncaster, and subject them to a horrific ordeal which has drawn parallels with the murder of James Bulger in 1993.
It has emerged that the two brothers had a long history of violence and involvement with social services and had been exposed to drugs and alcohol from an early age in a dysfunctional family.
The pair were finally placed in foster care just three weeks before the attack.
But Doncaster’s beleaguered social services have been criticised for failing to keep them under better supervision and placing them with foster parents rather than in residential care given their violent record.
In London, Haringey social services saw Peter Connelly, the toddler who came to be known as Baby P, up to 60 times before his death but failed to removing him despite signs of abuse.
Mr Narey, a former director general of the Prison Service, said that it was time for the authorities to recognise that there are families which “can’t be fixed”.
He said his views represented “illiberal heresy” in social services circles where there remains a determination to give “failed” parents a second chance.
“We just need to take more children into care if we really want to put the interests of the child first,” he said.
“We can’t keep trying to fix families that are completely broken.
“It sounds terrible, but I think we try too hard with birth parents… If we really cared about the interests of the child, we would take children away as babies and put them into permanent adoptive families, where we know they will have the best possible outcome.”
Chris Cloke, head of child protection awareness at the NSPCC, called for the authorities to act more quickly with babies to remove them from failed parents.
“Babies are particularly vulnerable so timescales generally need to be shorter in assessing their needs,” he said.
Stopping short of calling for children to be removed at birth, he said the Government should issue clearer guidelines on when children should be taken away from their families.
But Ed Balls, the Children’s Secretary, said: “I don’t think the right thing to do in these cases is immediately to put children into care.
“The right thing to do is to say can we sort out the problems in that family?”
Tim Loughton, the Conservative shadow children’s minister said: “Martin seems to have this predetermination that kids are destined to be problem kids and I don’t agree with that.
“The bottom line is that the people who know best how to look after their children are the parents of those children.
“There will be a small number of cases where clearly they are not up to it but Martin … sees a far greater role the state as being corporate parents, I just look at the record of the state and it is appalling.”