Identification concerns put plans to publish full serious case review in doubt
Janaki Mahadevan
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Junior children's minister Tim Loughton has said the government's plan to retrospectively publish the full serious case review of one of four high-profile cases is in doubt because of fears over the identification of surviving children.
In June, Loughton told CYP Now that the government would publish in full the serious case reviews of Baby Peter, Khyra Ishaq, the Edlington brothers and Shannon Matthews.
But addressing the Education Select Committee this week, he revealed that there were concerns about one of the cases which may prevent its full publication.
Responding to a question posed by committee member and Liberal Democrat MP Tessa Munt, Loughton said: "We said [the reviews] should be published subject to anonymisation, appropriate redaction and subject to there being no threat to the welfare of a surviving child or siblings.
"There may be examples in the future where local safeguarding children boards can make an argument as to why a serious case review should not be published in full. One of the retrospective reports we are looking to have published at the moment may come under that bracket and if it does it won’t be published."
He added that the government believed publishing the reviews in full would "rehabilitate the image of child protection in the eyes of the public".
"We didn’t just say every serious case review is going to be published and bulldozer that through regardless and we certainly didn’t say that retrospectively every one is going to be published," Loughton said. "We chose instead to highlight four high-profile cases which had very wide ramifications for the way we are doing child protection in this country."
