by Adam King, UnHerd
The Southport inquiry exposes buck-passing bureaucrats
Most of the inquests I have participated in took evidence from a bewildering constellation of acronymed hubs, teams, and services who support and liaise and refer in a blizzard of lengthy correspondence. And, often, the coroner will conclude that the death was partly caused by systemic shortcomings in the sharing of information and regrettable misunderstandings about the apportionment of responsibility. Further training is recommended.
To some extent, then, Shabana Mahmood was correct when in her statement to the House of Commons yesterday she described the findings of the Southport Inquiry’s Phase 1 report as “not surprising”, noting that “findings like these have been heard in inquests and inquiries before”. The report certainly makes plenty of recommendations of “training” for the various “agencies” concerned — police, NHS, Lancashire County Council and its many emanations. Quite sensibly, no doubt. But there can also be heard in Sir Adrian Fulford’s report some bolder, unexpected notes, the beginnings of a tune, perhaps, that many are starting to hum, though not yet in great numbers at the heart of today’s Establishment.
In the opening pages, Sir Adrian describes as “a fundamental failure” the fact that the relevant public-sector agencies were guilty of “an enduring focus… on the potential risk of harm to [Axel Rudakubana] as opposed to the risks that he posed to others”. More important than that, he argues that the “merry-go-round of referrals, assessments, case-closures and ‘hand-offs’” among these agencies “has to end”.
The report’s principal concern is the risk to the public, and how that risk was wrongly assessed, communicated, and responded to. But there is another risk at play here: the risk to the individual state employee who steps up to take responsibility for someone like Rudakubana. When something as terrible as the murder of innocent children occurs, no one wants to be in that position. And one way of avoiding that — of everyone avoiding it together — is precisely the referral merry-go-round the report decries: if you wanted to design a system for avoiding responsibility in these circumstances, or at least spreading it so thinly as to make no difference, you could hardly do better than the status quo.