Publish torture case report - Tory

Tory Michael Gove has called for a report into the Edlington torture case to be published
12 April 2012

The Conservatives have stepped up pressure on Children's Secretary Ed Balls to publish a report into the Edlington torture case.

Mr Balls last week rejected calls from Tory leader David Cameron for publication of the Serious Case Review (SCR), which sets out in full the results of an investigation into officials' handling of the brothers who on Friday were given indefinite custodial sentences for a vicious attack on two young boys.

Instead, he defended the practice of publishing only an executive summary with most of the details removed.

In a letter to Mr Balls, shadow children's secretary Michael Gove said that the full lessons of the incident in South Yorkshire would not be learned unless the Government accepted the need for "transparency, accountability, openness and candour".

And he suggested that the horrific attack - which involved "prolonged sadistic violence" and sexual humiliation by the 10 and 11-year-old brothers on their victims, aged nine and 11 - could have been prevented if SCRs on previous child cruelty cases had been published in full.

"We know, from what has now been reported, that the Edlington tragedy was preventable if only children's services had been operating properly," said Mr Gove. "If those SCRs had been fully in the public domain then the council would have been held more accountable and the pressure to make real improvements would have been greater. Secrecy has served no-one."

At Prime Minister's Questions in the House of Commons on Wednesday, Mr Cameron demanded the publication of the SCR in full, arguing that the release of summaries in cases like that of Baby Peter had not led to action.

But Prime Minister Gordon Brown retorted that children's organisations, professionals and child safety report author Lord Laming all opposed publication of Serious Case Reviews because it might lead to the identification of vulnerable children and inhibit frankness from those involved - a position repeated by Mr Balls after the brothers were sentenced.

On Saturday Mr Gove denounced the Government's argument for secrecy as "remarkable" and told Mr Balls it was "simply not good enough to hide behind others". The executive summary on the Edlington case was "a wholly inadequate document" which failed to reflect the scale of shortcomings on the part of official agencies revealed in the full SCR, which was leaked to the BBC, he said.

He added: "We urgently need to reform and improve child protection in this country. Every year new cases of scarcely imaginable horror hammer at the nation's conscience, governments pledge that lessons must be learned, but the documents which contain those lessons are kept under lock and key, censored by the establishment. When will we learn?"

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