Ian Huntley

When home secretary David Blunkett announced an inquiry into how Ian Huntley was allowed to get a job as a school caretaker after he was given a double life sentence for the murder of 10-year-old schoolfriends Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in December it seemed that it would be relatively small-scale operation, writes Sally Gillen.

Its remit was to look at the child protection procedures in place at Humberside and Cambridgeshire police forces, the record-keeping of intelligence, the effectiveness of vetting processes and information sharing with other agencies to find out why a string of sexual allegations in Huntley’s past, including an indecent assault on an 11-year-old, had not been picked up before he was given the job.

Compared with Lord Laming’s inquiry into the death of Victoria Climbie, which heard from 277 witnesses, lasted over a year and revealed flaws in the entire child protection system, this one would be more focused on police processes alone.

Three weeks into the inquiry, it has emerged that this may not be the case. While its witnesses may be far fewer in number, what they have had to say at the Huntley inquiry, chaired by Sir Michael Bichard, has been in some cases as shocking as what emerged from the Laming inquiry.

Deep-rooted problems revealed

Day after day professionals, including some from the police, social services and the school attended by Holly and Jessica, have given evidence revealing deep-rooted problems in the child protection system and a worrying fragility of the vetting processes in particular. 

Errors ranging from the basic failure of a headteacher to check Huntley’s job references to the inability of the Criminal Records Bureau to verify vital information provided by job applicants, have been laid bare.

Before the inquiry began it had seemed that North East Lincolnshire social services, which dealt with four cases of underage sex involving Huntley over a nine-month period between 1995 and 1996 and the allegation of an indecent assault two years later, was still only a bit part player in the case.
   
Acting deputy director of childcare Darren Shaw said in December “even with the benefit of hindsight there is nothing we could have done differently".
 
Earlier this month, current deputy director of childcare Martin Eaden appeared at the inquiry and gave evidence suggesting the opposite. He had a rather different take on what had taken place within the department as he struggled to explain the baffling decisions taken by staff. And there was a lot to explain.

He did not know why an unnamed male social worker had arranged for the first of the 15-year-old girls, known to be having a sexual relationship with 21-year-old Huntley, and her 13-year-old brother, to stay with him.

The handling of the second case involving a 15-year-old girl and Huntley, Eaden summed up as “totally inadequate in every sense”. He reached this conclusion after hearing that she had been living with Huntley and his father, who had contacted social services to say he would be going to work away, and she would be left alone with Huntley.

No action was taken and Huntley himself made a referral to social services citing “moral concerns”. But still no action was taken.

Neither was there an explanation for the failure by social services to pass on to police a fax from a deputy head teacher detailing concerns that Huntley was having a sexual relationship with a pair of 15-year-old school friends, and had given them drugs and alcohol

Failure to link cases

Worse was to come when senior social worker Phil Watters, who also gave evidence, admitted he had failed to link three cases involving Huntley just days apart.

Aside from the individual decisions made by social workers it has become clear that the records they keep may be ineffective. Their database only records details of service users, and Humberside police told the inquiry that they did not record arrests on the police national computer, just charges.

Both the police and social services admitted they saw no point in pursuing Huntley because the girls regarded him as a boyfriend, despite the fact they were in their mid-teens and he in his early 20s.

Consequently, because of the way record-keeping systems operated nobody ever linked the fact that he was involved in allegations involving four underage girls in less than a year.

Flaws in criminal checks

Not only has the inquiry highlighted serious gaps in the type of information social services and police hold, but also a worrying lack of rigour in the vetting process carried out by the Criminal Record Bureau.

The inquiry heard from one witness that there was a “flaw” in the process carried out by the CRB that meant addresses provided by a person who was going to be vetted could not be checked.

Such information is vitally important because it determines which police force will carry out the checks on the job applicant. Counsel to the inquiry James Eadie asked incredulously “what sort of system was it that relied on the honesty of the individual” to be truthful in what they disclosed.

He will not be the only one who wants to know how the creation of the CRB, dogged by problems since its launch in 2002, has improved the vetting process.

The headteacher of Soham Village College, the school attended by Holly and Jessica, said he had not checked references supplied by Huntley until after Huntley’s arrest, despite the fact Huntley’s predecessor was sacked for having an inappropriate relationship with a student.

Admitting it was a “mistake”, Howard Gilbert added that it was not uncommon in schools to allow new staff to begin work before they had been vetted. A directive from the Department for Education and Skills in August 2002 that all checks had to be complete before a new member of staff began work had been withdrawn because it had caused chaos. This means there may be thousands of people employed in schools around the country who have not been vetted.

Crucially, Gilbert said there was little guidance on how to include child protection issues within interviews with non-teaching staff to check their suitability to working with children (Huntley had no track record in this respect) much beyond asking what the interviewee would do if a student developed a crush on them.

How useful such a measure was to prevent “the wolf getting into the sheep’s pen”, counsel had asked. When the inquiry concludes at the end of March and Bichard and his team retire to consider what they heard before reporting in mid-May, it is likely they might be asking themselves the same question about the whole system.