Systemic failures that left Southport children at risk | Letters

Letters: Readers respond to the inquiry findings of gross incompetence by government agencies, which led to three little girls being killed by Axel Rudakubana

While many public agencies, along with Axel Rudakubana and his parents, have rightly been highlighted as carrying the blame for the devastating attack on children in Southport, there are some elements of our national systems that repeatedly walk away untouched by criticism (Editorial, 13 April).

Social services, the health service, police, Prevent and schools are all organised and funded by our government. The government decides how these agencies should function and what their responsibilities are.

When ministers take momentous decisions such as plunging the country into more than a decade of withering austerity, and tell the public that there are no other possible options, they make political choices, and those choices have consequences.

Civil servants and the rather shadowy world of special advisers will of course be entwined in much of the thinking and planning, but our elected ministers and the cabinet ultimately make the decisions. They may from time to time face uncomfortable questions, such as during the Covid inquiry, but for the most part, the layer of their decision-making is perhaps too distant and too abstract for the remit of the inquiry. There are people walking among us who pose great danger, and they don’t all carry knives.
Sean O’Sullivan
Banbury, Oxfordshire

• The Southport findings raise the need to immediately halt the “families first” policy of this government and raise funding for children’s services while a thorough independent review is undertaken. Southport shows that families first-type thinking and practice, plus reductions in local authority funding, reduce the monitoring and intervention of professionals. The incoming families first policy seeks to reduce this further. Prevent being overwhelmed shows there is at least unsafe uncertainty as to the prevalence of the Southport conditions.

The families first lobby does not wish it to be recognised that some children have multiple co-occurring, interacting high-level and need-intensive preoccupation and care needs beyond what a family can provide. Southport and the Prevent programme show that they exist and a system-wide workforce development programme is needed so that people can recognise when monitoring needs to become intensive intervention.
Jonathan Stanley
Godmanchester, Cambridgeshire

• The blamestorming of parents and public bodies concerned with Axel Rudakubana begins in earnest as yet another inquiry seeks to understand why a council hamstrung by massive cuts to its budget, a police force with too few staff and a fixation on inclusivity all combined to leave a dangerous individual at large to commit the most horrendous crime.

We constantly hear the excuses of failing service providers, but the reality of having a top-heavy managerial structure escapes public scrutiny and does little to protect the public.
Gordon Jackson
Cheadle Hulme, Greater Manchester

• I read that the Southport inquiry by Sir Adrian Fulford came to the conclusion that multiple agencies all thought that someone else was doing something, so nobody did anything. Isn’t that the same conclusion as the Victoria Climbié inquiry by Lord Laming in 2003? Any chance of the lesson being learned any time soon?
Roger Cook
Rufforth, North Yorkshire

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