Horrific yet inevitable – care failures can no longer be ignored

There is depressingly little in the awful case of 'Beastie House' that surprises Common Weal. This appalling failure has led to calls for the resignations, but it is essential that people understand that it is the whole system which has failed, and the entire culture of government is culpable.

To recap in the briefest way possible without documenting the terror of that house, young children repeatedly begged multiple officials not to leave them alone, not to abandon them. The officials did abandon them, categorised them as 'the problem', ignored their please for help and made clear that not provoking a complaint from the parents was a priority.

The outcome of this was that over this extended period of time the children were raped and physically abused. The current Chief Executive of Glasgow City Council was then the person with ultimate responsibility over the affair. There have been multiple calls for her resignation – but not from Councillors in Glasgow who have been notably quiet.

Common Weal is surprised by none of this. There are three major pieces of work we have done which explains this failure. The first and the key text is the report by former senior social worker Colin Turbett called Struggling to Care. It documents the devastation and virtual dismantlement of social work services since the 1990s.

It explains their fragmentation and their transition from being support services offering care to being 'problem managers' there to prevent risk. The shift in focus from care to enforcement is part of the mindset in Scottish governance that people are 'the problem' and that 'this problem' has somehow to be 'managed' to make it ''not a problem'.

The second key document is Marion McLeod's Child Care or Caring for Children?. It takes a comprehensive view of all early years services and one of the points it makes strongly is that the culture of government in Scotland is unable to differentiate between poor people and poor parenting.

There is an appalling class bias which 'expects' poorer families to be 'bad parents' and so 'prices in' conditions for children and dependents which would not be considered acceptable in a middle class household. This class bias is pervasive and the constantly increasing gap between the lives of officials (who are mostly near or at the top of Scotland's income spectrum) and the half of the population who are below median income (whose incomes have stagnated) is growing.

There is a lack of empathy and care and a high-handed mindset which prioritises the interests of the official over the child. That is apparent in this context when it is clear that officials were more concerned about the possibility of being the subject of a complaint than about obvious distress in the children which they wrote off as 'bad behaviour'.

This is difficult for Common Weal to understand. In child psychology and care services it is absolutely idiomatic that bad or disruptive behaviour on the part of a child is a red flag to warn of distress or other problems. Here it was used as an excuse for officials to go home early (while covering their backs).

The final document is the Care Group's Caring For All, a comprehensive model of an effective National Care Service. Among the extensive analysis in that report, it makes clear that care is based on extended, trusting relationships and that the way that care is now delivered makes that almost impossible.

It also makes clear that the rights-based approach which the Scottish Government is largely meaningless and in the 'Beastie House' case it couldn't be clearer. The child victims have human rights protections in Scotland, but to realise them they would have to have made an appointed at the Citizens Advice Bureau and then find a way to appoint a lawyer. These victims were both under 13.

The council officials acted in the interests of the council, the parents acted in the their own depraved interests. Absolutely no-one in this appalling case was acting on behalf of the children. Opponents of the Named Person scheme who have not proposed alternative support mechanisms should look at this – a Named Person was precisely so the children had a single, named person they could trust that they could have gone to.

Another point which is made in the above reports is that there is now a highly punitive litigious approach taken to care workers. The backlog of low-pay staff who are subjects of complaints to the Care Inspectorate is substantial. But it is the low-pay staff who work in the culture created with the allocated resources, carefully managed by intrusive managers who are punished, not the manager responsible for the culture, the resources and the system.

It is very hard to feel that 'lessons must be learned in a general way' is anything approaching an acceptable response to this horror. It is particularly galling to read when the Scottish Government has more or less abandoned social care altogether in the aftermath of its National Care Service failure.

Common Weal has set out comprehensively and in detail what child services should be if this is never to happen again, and how that should be integrated into an effective, working national service. The Scottish Government not only refused to listen to this, it tried actively to use care-experienced people to undermine experts.

Sometimes a case is so appalling that justice must seen to be served and change must be real. If this isn't such a case, that is a sign that there is a real and fundamental rottenness in Scottish public life.