‘Turning public services around: Haringey’s story of child protection’

Haringey is the place I grew up. I was born here when Harold Wilson was Prime Minister. I went to school here in the 80s under Thatcher, lived here through the Labour years in the late 90s and 2000s and went into politics here under the Tories in the 2010s. It’s a place with a long history of social and political radicalism. In the 80s this was the heart of the battle to ‘defend your services’.

Growing up here though, my own tangles with the local council told me a few things. Public servants are usually very committed but they need to be properly rooted in their communities to get things done – and done well. A few decades later when I became leader of the very same council, the mission I took into it was simple: listen and collaborate.

READ MORE: ‘After years of cuts, Labour’s local government settlement begins to put things right’

That is all the more important in Haringey. This is the borough where Victoria Climbié and Baby P died, two decades ago now. We all felt outrage and disbelief at how it could have happened and what had gone wrong with child protection services. The system had let the most vulnerable children down and Haringey’s social services were rightly the subject of multiple public inquiries.

The story since is one of rebuilding. That starts with an acceptance of what has failed and what needs to change. We have a mantra in Haringey now to ‘get the basics right’. I don’t want us to hide away from what isn’t working. I want us to be open about it and come up with a plan to fix it. That demands collaboration. You have to listen to people when they tell you there are problems and admit when systems are at fault.

There will be a journey of change of course – and plenty that can knock it off course. When austerity struck in the Tory years, wiping out more than half of Haringey’s funding from government, it could have upended our rebuilding effort in child protection. We took the early political choice to protect and expand funding for children’s services. We moved social workers onto secure job contracts to stabilise the service and help build a culture of high standards in the team. We built up proper collaboration inside and outside the council, across housing and child protection teams and with the NHS and police. And it worked.

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Last week, for the first time ever, Haringey’s children’s services were rated Outstanding by OFSTED. It’s a remarkable turnaround – and shows what collaboration, investment and reform can do. That work goes on and on of course. We can still collaborate more, still do more to bring people in and democratise how we work. In the years to come, we push for better still.

At a time when public services – and really the whole system – feels broken, the story of what has happened here should be cause for hope. Systems can change. Public services can be turned around. We can rebuild and renew. That’s where our focus should be.

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