Children’s minister Margaret Hodge has ordered all social services departments to review cases where children were placed under a care order in which medical experts had "serious disagreements" over how they came to harm.
Social workers will comb through records dating back 18 years as part of the 12-week review and will need to ask whether "there are now doubts about the reliability of the expert medical evidence", she said.
Hodge added that she did not want to speculate about the precise number of cases that would fall into that category but it was likely to be "no more than the low hundreds rather than… thousands".
Association of Directors of Social Services president Andrew Cozens said 38,000 cases in England had to be considered, of which 400-500 would be reviewed because they involved disputed medical evidence.
Then "a much smaller number" would warrant further
investigation. He said the task should be achievable in the
three-month timescale set.
The move comes a month after attorney general Lord Goldsmith
ordered the Criminal Cases Review Commission to re-examine 258
convictions over the deaths of children under two years old, some
of which may have been unsafe, following the acquittal of Angela
Cannings.
Cannings was wrongly convicted of killing her babies following now
discredited expert evidence by paediatrician Professor Sir Roy
Meadow and was freed in December.
Hodge described the case as "tragic" and said there may be other
cases where children had been "wrongly separated" from their
families.
Care needed with review
26 February 2004
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Government Legislation
17 July 2008
Private Member Bills
17 July 2008
Details of government consultations
11 July 2008
