Who'd want to work in social work? If you do your job really well, the best you can hope for is for things to go smoothly and then you'll be mildly disliked or labelled as 'interfering'. If you make a mistake, or if something goes badly wrong and a child is badly abused or dies, then every decision you made will be scrutinised and criticised. You will face as much or more vilification in the press than the abusers themselves.
It's an interesting dance, the blame game, when things like this go wrong. If you're trying to manage a department where it costs an arm and a leg each day to keep a child in care, there will always be a pressure from above (ultimately from the Government) to cut costs by keeping children with their parents. Your staff simply don't have spare capacity in the system to place all the children that they consider might be at risk into care, in addition they have heavy workloads and much red tape and procedure to follow, they are liasing with other bodies like the medical profession and the poilce who are also overloaded. It's no wonder things get missed.
So whose fault is it when things go wrong? Does the blame lie with the overworked social worker, the overworked constable, the overworked doctor, the manager who has her budget defined from above, or does it lie with those in government like Ed Balls (at the time) whose belief is that efficiency savings can always be found without compromising the service?
Well of course, if you're Ed Balls and you see a pile of
**** heading your way, you will seek to deflect it onto anyone you can, no matter how fair it is to do that. "What dreadful social workers we have!" "How poorly managed the system was!" etc. Never suggest that it's your own fault for paring it down to the bare minimum and insisting that there is never any slack in the system.
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