Last updated 11:46, Tuesday, 18 November 2008

If Baby P knew anything at all in the last few tortured months of his tormented little life, it must have been that his was not a good time to be a child.

Baby P

He knew no unconditional mother’s love, no safeguarding protection from a strong gently defensive father, no peace, no freedom from pain, no dignity, no hope. Neither did he know his survival of diabolically persistent abuse relied on a dreaded “multi-agency committee” of jobsworths – watching their backs and barely seeing their victim.

Poor little mite. He never stood a chance of escape from the hell that was to lead him in agony to the end his short, sorrowful life.

Doomed to be the target of sick, deliberate, regimented violence for so long as he could find the energy to draw breath, 17-month-old Baby P can’t even find rest in his desperately unhappy death.

Still those people charged with his care and protection from harm are making excuses for themselves and each other; justifying the months of failings and buck-passing that amounted to a sentence of domestic execution, as an overall improvement on their previous systemic failures.

God help all kids at the mercy of multi-agency-child-protection-social-care-initiatives... and jobsworths collecting gold stars and ticks for their pristine paperwork.

God help them too when they find themselves trapped in what are erroneously referred to as family homes but which are in fact prisons of interminable misery and unimaginable cruelty.

We have no way of knowing how many more children suffer like Baby P in imposed pain and anguish – all we know is that they surely do. We know also that too many of them go unnoticed, their silent pleas for help undetected by social workers.

“We were following the all-London child protection procedures,” a Haringey council spokesman said yesterday.

“These do not specify that the police should be informed of every incident relating to a child with a protection plan, whether or not felt to be suspicious.”

Procedures. How immovably precious procedures are these days. They overrule life, death and mortal injury.

Throw procedures onto the agenda of a multi-agency meeting and recipe for disaster is complete.

Gut instinct, intuition, suspicion, bruises, missing fingernails, even a child with a broken back, count for little or nothing when set against agreed and approved procedures.

How many times, we are surely bound to wonder, does anyone in any local authority – or even in national government – dare to suggest the procedures may be wrong? Not many is my guess.

Baby P’s life was sacrificed to procedure. He died on the altar of a sadist’s perversely evil leisure pursuits – and multi-agency social service cast iron procedures.

Oh, of course there’ll be the clatter of high level inquiries, leading to issue of censure, qualified by acceptance of aggravation by heavy workloads.

There’ll more than likely be a tinkering with procedures – as there was when Victoria Climbie’s wholly avoidable death sent similar shockwaves of anger and revulsion through the country.

There’ll be assurances that lessons have been learned, that more lessons will be learned, that children will now be safeguarded more vigorously. Just as we heard when Victoria was lost.

The next due assurances will mean every bit as much as they meant then. And had they been worth the procedural reports on which they were printed, Baby P would have been saved.

Haringey Council’s latest statement assures: “We have accepted that more could have been done to protect Baby P. We are truly sorry for that. The Government has ordered a review of all agencies involved in this case.

“The review has started and is being carried out by Ofsted, the Commission for Healthcare Audit and Inspection and the Chief Inspector of Constabulary. A report is due to submitted to Government by December 1.

“Both Haringey Council and the Local Safeguarding Children Board will, of course, co-operate fully with that review.”

It’s enough to send dismayed, disappointed and despairing blood run cold. A multi-agency investigation into a series of multi-agency blunders costing a child’s life – again.

On any number of the 60 occasions this registered at risk child was seen he could have been taken away from his mother and her boyfriend.

But the right-on child protection wisdom is that all children are infinitely better off at home than in care.

It’s also true that children are more cheaply kept at home than in care but we’ll never get any council to admit that a child died as a result of budgeting issues. That would be dynamite... and not at all right-on.

So long as obviously unfit parents are allowed to have children, babies like tortured little P will exist with only the merciful release of death to look forward to.

Somewhere, anywhere, in secret or known only to a procedurally-driven few, they will know a terror most of us wouldn’t dare to imagine.

So long as they do exist, they will need protection – swift escape routes from their personal hell into the arms of warmth, safety, love and the chance of a future.

And we leave these fundamental life and death rights of children at risk in the hands of politically correct, box-ticking, budget-bound, bureaucratic, self-important local councils? It’s an outrageous insanity.

And before leaping to the defence of buck-passing, so-called child protection services, try asking Victoria and little Baby P whether they think we’re valuing our children highly enough.

I think we all know what their answer would be. But in death it’s unlikely they will be afforded the voice that was never allowed in life.