Social workers need to be freed from bureaucracy

Tim Loughton has highlighted new figures showing a significant rise in care applications since the Baby Peter tragedy became public last year.

Tim, the Shadow Children's Minister, said the statistics imply that there was a sharp decline in children being taken into care the year before:

"This strongly suggests that local authorities were raising the threshold for initiating care proceedings when faced with the triple whammy of social worker shortages, scarcity of foster care placements and tightening budgets."

He called for social workers and other professionals at the sharp end to be freed from the bureaucratic system of child protection "so they can make informed value judgements from first hand experience rather than on the basis of computer assessments".