Council chief urged to quit after starvation case
The shocking starvation of a seven-year-old girl at the hands of her own mother in England raised questions about social services and led to calls for a senior council official to quit.
During the trial of Angela Gordon and Junaid Abuhamza – jailed today for the manslaughter of Khyra Ishaq – it emerged that Birmingham City Council was aware of concerns about the child’s welfare almost five months before her death.
Jurors were shown a series of photographs from inside the terraced home Khyra shared with the defendants and five other children, including pictures of a well-stocked kitchen.
Photographs of cupboards packed with groceries and a fridge full of food contrasted sharply with the shocking image of Khyra’s skeletal body, seen by the jury.
But prosecutor Timothy Raggatt QC told the court the kitchen was kept locked by a bolt “out of the reach of the children” to prevent them helping themselves to food.
At mealtimes they were given a bowl containing carrots, beans, eggs and rice, or unsweetened porridge, to share between them.
The meagre meal would be placed before them on the floor of the room in which they slept on bare mattresses.
Mr Raggatt told the jury: “The essence of it was this, what they got was a single bowl of food to share between the six of them.
“They didn’t get the means to eat it separately. They didn’t get separate meals. They were given a bowl of food and they, as it were, got what they could from the bowl of food.
“If a child ate too much, then they would be hit with the cane that I showed you a picture of.”
The court heard that by the time of her death Khyra had lost about 40% of her body weight and was so thin her body mass index could not be measured on any available chart.
Numerous visits were paid to her Birmingham home by teachers, police, social workers and council home-schooling experts after she was withdrawn from school in December 2007, but she was seen by social workers on only one occasion – for around 10 minutes on her mother’s doorstep.
The trial, which ended last week, sparked calls for Birmingham City Council’s strategic director for children, young people and families, Tony Howell, to resign.
Mr Howell said such a step would serve no purpose, adding that “major changes” had been made and a serious case review into Khyra’s death was still being conducted by the Birmingham Safeguarding Children Board.
In a statement released after today’s sentencing at Birmingham Crown Court, Children’s Secretary Ed Balls said: “There are clearly serious questions to be answered about what local services and professionals were doing in the months before this tragedy took place and why local professionals failed to see her and check on her welfare in the months before she died.
“As the trial has shown, it is now clear that concerns about these children were not acted upon effectively and it is right that a serious case review has been carried out.”
Last week damning comments from a high court judge were released to the press for the first time, concluding that “in all probability” Khyra Ishaq would not have died if there had been “an adequate initial assessment and proper adherence by the educational welfare services to its guidance”.
In a ruling of March last year, relating to care proceedings, Mrs Justice King said: “It is beyond belief that, in 2008, in a bustling, energetic and modern city like Birmingham, a child of seven was withdrawn from school and thereafter kept in squalid conditions for a period of five months before finally dying of starvation.”
The judge added: “On the evidence before the court I can only conclude that in all probability had there been an adequate initial assessment and proper adherence by the educational welfare services to its guidance, K would not have died.
“Merely looking at the photographs of the house and the conditions in which the children were living confirms in my mind that had social services even seen the bedroom in which the children lived or the manner in which they were fed, they would undoubtedly have intervened.”
Mr Balls said a summary of the findings of the serious case review would be published “shortly”.
He added: “The government has already taken decisive action to intervene in Birmingham’s children’s services, following Ofsted’s judgment in December 2008 that their services were inadequate in terms of safeguarding. If we think there is more to do, we will.”
