Arthur Labinjo-Hughes was a six-year-old boy who was tragically neglected and then killed in 2020 whilst living with his stepmother and father. In late 2021 they were found guilty in court of murder and manslaughter, and jailed.
After his biological mother was jailed for killing an abusive partner, his father, Thomas Hughes, assumed custody. When the first Covid-19 lockdown was announced, Hughes and Arthur moved in with Hughes’ girlfriend, Emma Tustin. From the moment he arrived, the abuse started.
Tustin made Arthur sleep on the floor in the front room and stand for hours in the hallway alone. She poisoned his food with salt and would repeatedly shake and hit him. The abuses eventually culminated in the brain injury which killed him.
In Court, Tustin – although she admitted two counts of child cruelty – claimed that Arthur was badly behaved and aggressive, and said his fatal injury was self-inflicted. But police had access to a wealth of evidence showing the sheer cruelty with which Arthur had been treated. A CCTV camera in the front room of the house showed Arthur being forced to sleep on the floor and the torrents of verbal abuse he was subjected to. Tustin’s phone had hundreds of clips of abuse too, with Arthur being heard in one to say, “No one loves me” and “No one is going to feed me”. Both Tustin and Hughes have since been jailed.
In another recent high-profile case, 16-month-old Star Hobson was killed by Savannah Brockhill, the partner of Star’s mother Frankie Smith, after a year of abuse and neglect.
Family members and friends raised concerns about Star’s safety on several occasions and police and social workers paid multiple visits to her and her mother. CCTV footage from September showed Star being abused by Brockhill at a recycling plant where she worked whilst Star’s mother went drinking with friends. Footage from a week later showed Star’s mother dragging her through Bradford town centre on toddler reins, her head lolling to one side. Two days later Star was dead.
In December 2021, Brockhill was convicted of murder and given a life sentence. Frankie Smith, Star’s mother, was cleared of murder and manslaughter but given eight years for allowing the death of a child.
In both cases, social workers and police visited the child before closing the case without intervention. The scale of abuse suffered in these cases has led many to question how it flew under the radar for so long, even after multiple people had raised concerns. As is often the case when tragic stories of abuse hit the headlines, many have looked to place the blame at the hands of social workers involved in the cases.
But longer term, this blame game will likely lead to raised anxiety and defensive practice. That could lead to a more heavy-handed and less collaborative approach with families, and more children taken into care. That is doesn’t necessarily mean children will be any safer.
These cases come as just the most recent in a long line of kids tragically failed by our care systems. To understand how and why we so often seem to end up here it is important to consider the system as a whole. It is entirely possible that there were failings on an individual level, but these cases take place against the broader backdrop of over a decade of degradation of children's services in the UK.
Since the Tories took power in 2010, funding to children's services have been cut to shreds. Research by Action For Children has found that between 2010 and 2019 more than £2 billion had been slashed from Children’s services – a 23% reduction.
These cuts have decimated the ability of local authorities to maintain their early intervention programmes. For example, the Guardian reported in 2018 that over 1000 Sure Start centres across Britain have closed since 2010. Meanwhile the number of child protection inquiries has risen 139% between 2008/9 and 2018/19.
Over the same period, the number of children on child protection plans increased by more than 18,000 and number of looked after children reached a new high of 75,420 in 2017-18. An average of 88 children are now coming into care every day.
Areas where inequality is highest have the most demand for children’s services and social care but are the areas with the largest cuts.
So social workers are overworked, handling huge caseloads – often with minimal support from senior management. The strain of such a high workload means that social workers have less time to spend on each case, less time in home visits and less time with the child they are trying to help. It's also common for children and families to see multiple social workers for short periods of time, as they move through different assessments and are passed to different departments.
This leaves more and more cracks in the system for children to become lost in. Social workers cannot build rapport or trust with the families and children they work with. This creates a workplace with low morale with the emotional wellbeing of social workers left by the wayside. One where there is insufficient thinking space and a lack of decent, reflective supervision and professional curiosity.
The Munro recommendations said that social workers needed to be able to “know what it is like in a child’s world” with purposeful, direct work and interactions with children - not just visits to "see" them. Within the current system none of that is possible.
As council cuts bite ever deeper, one solution has been to move children’s services out of direct council control into the hands of independent organisations known as “trusts”. Across the country there have been nine trusts created to take over children’s services after local authorities have “failed”. The Department for Education said in 2016 that they hoped that by 2020 almost a third of councils would be delivering children’s services “through a new model”, after then Prime Minister David Cameron set out reforms to the field. It’s good that fewer councils than expected have moved their services to trusts. However, it’s important not to underestimate the danger that outsourcing and privatisation still pose to children’s services.
In spite of the government’s enthusiasm for this outsourcing, improvement has been slow. Trusts in poor areas such as Slough and Sunderland are being rated “inadequate” and “requiring improvement” by Ofsted.
The Slough trust was also seen to have a “tense and dysfunctional” relationship with its parent council and faced such a serious financial crisis that it may never repay the funds it owes the local authority. Where trusts do appear to have been successful, it is in wealthier areas such as Kingston and Windsor and Maidenhead. This suggests that the problem is funding, not council control.
In local authorities in England, 15% of social workers in children’s social services are employed through private for-profit employment agencies, and local authorities are paying £335m a year for agency social workers. Assuming just 5% profit, that would add up to £16.75m, while profits by social worker employment agencies in England from children’s social services are likely to be more than £10m a year.
In England, around 80% of children’s homes are now privately run, for profit. Foster care is moving in a similar direction, with private agencies now providing homes for one in three children with foster families. By outsourcing care, local authorities have lost control over quality, cost and location of homes for vulnerable children, while capitalists line their pockets off them.
All of this together adds up to local authorities paying more for services that aren’t any better.
Covid-19 has exacerbated these problems further. Inequality has risen, schools have been closed, social life has paused. Social workers do not safeguard children, the networks around children safeguard them.
It cannot be overstated the extent to which the pandemic has made it even harder to spot the signs of abuse. The pandemic has made placed barriers in the way of social workers accessing the non-professional networks around children, which have greater access to the child in question and in turn are able to alert authorities to potential issues far more proactively. Moreover, it has thrown obstacles in the way of home visits. In houses where there is Covid, social workers can only do Zoom visits and doorstep or garden visits, much less than a full home session.
Whilst the government has made a big deal of the potential “hidden harms” of Covid lockdowns, they have done very little to assuage this potential harm. There has been little to no extra funding for children’s or adult’s social services since early 2020.
Social workers are being asked to deal with more numerous and complex cases with less resources. This lends itself to “check box” assessments, where the lack of time and lack of access make assessments rigid and programmatic rather than empowering social workers to use their instincts and follow up on their concerns.
Unison is currently in the process of balloting members for strike action over pay. Social workers should vote yes on that action. They also need to go further. They should be looking to build struggles with other local authority workers to reduce workloads, end outsourcing and restore council funding. Only by building those fights can we begin to fix our care systems and truly protect vulnerable children and families.
