Just days after the government wrote to all local authorities and local safeguarding children boards asking them to publish all future serious case reviews in full, Kirklees unveiled the summary of the review into nine-year-old Shannon Matthews, notoriously abducted by her family in February 2008.
The police operation that followed the abduction in Dewsbury was covered widely in the national press, eventually finding that Shannon's mother Karen, along with her step-uncle Michael Donovan, had taken and hidden the child. Both were jailed in December 2008.
Following the trial, a serious case review was launched amid claims that Kirklees Council's social services failed Shannon. But the review published last week concluded that the authority could not have foreseen the abduction.
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