Last updated 11:24, Tuesday, 18 November 2008

Children’s Secretary Ed Balls was today adding another layer of legislated paperwork to the already multi-layered confusion that has so far proved to fail children at risk.

He wants to create greater accountability for a child’s wellbeing, with local services forced to chart their progress in intervening at an early stage.

Additional charting is his response to the disgraceful failure to save 17-month-old Baby P from the appalling abuse that led to his lonely, agonising death while under the protection of social services in the London Borough of Haringey.

Under these plans every local authority will have to have a multi-agency Children’s Trust Board, responsible for improving the safety and wellbeing of all children and young people in the area.

Whether they will include requiring child protection professionals to spot a baby’s broken back, bruises, missing fingernails, blood-splattered cot, is unclear.

Whether those strategies will release social workers from form-filling long enough to recognise that a toddler with a shaven head and battered body might have urgent problems isn’t even debatable.

Another level of pen-pushing legislation is the last thing children doomed by violence and neglect need. What they’re pleading for is that those already charged with their protection do their jobs properly and save their lives.