By Charlotte Webster-
The Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel’s review into the killing of the six-year-old by his stepmother, Emma Tustin, and father, Thomas Hughes,(pictured) in Solihull have concluded that there were systematically flawed joint working undermined agencies whose ability to help Labinjo Hughes were affected.
The panel found that professionals in Solihull had only a limited understanding of what life was like for him, did not always hear his voice, did not challenge their initial framing of his father, Thomas, as protective, and did not take the concerns of his wider family seriously.
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Family concerns for Star Hobson and Arthur Labinjo-Hughes were too often “disregarded and not taken sufficiently seriously”, the report on how professionals failed to protect them says.
In the case of Arthur, the review said his wider family had “contacted every agency they could think of” some several times, but “their voice was not heard”.
The national review said the “extraordinarily harrowing video footage and images” of both Arthur and Star during the final weeks and days of their lives “no doubt contributed to questions being asked about how well children are protected in England”.
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Helen Westerman, from children’s charity the NSPCC, said the review “finally gives Arthur a voice” and it needed to be a catalyst for “fundamental changes”.
Solihull Council said the panel of national experts had “shone a light” on its services, and had given it “some really important areas to sort out”.
Tustin and Hughes’s trial heard that after his death, 130 bruises were found on the six-year-old’s body.
The murdered child’s grandparents voiced growing concerns about bruising on 16 April 2020, police denied a request to carry out a welfare check later the same day.
An officer had visited the home during a missing persons inquiry the day before and said there were no safeguarding concerns, describing Hughes as “a caring father”.
The jury was told the abuse did not stop there, with Arthur subjected to salt poisoning, deprived of food and drink and made to stand alone for hours on end.
Arthur, aged 6 from Solihull, and Star, 16 months from Bradford, were murdered by their parents’ partners in 2020.
Both “suffered horrific and ultimately fatal abuse”, Annie Hudson, who chaired the review said.
Their deaths reflect “fault lines” in child protection in England, she added.
The review of England’s council-run children’s services says struggling families need early intervention to ensure they do not reach crisis point.
The recommendations include phasing out young offender institutions and a drive to recruit more foster parents.
Ministers promised “ambitious and detailed” plans before the end of 2022
The panel cited as a critical problem Solihull council’s failure to convene a multi-agency strategy meeting when Arthur’s paternal grandmother reported bruising on his back – in April 2020, two months before his death.
The children’s social care service adopted a “single agency” approach in carrying out a home visit, which left social workers strongly reliant on self-reports by Tustin and Hughes, without the ability to triangulate these with other information. The whole process prevented professionals from challenging their own biases about the family, including the belief that Hughes was a protective factor for Arthur.
The panel’s conclusion was that a pivotal dynamic underpinning many of these practice issues was a systemic flaw in the quality of multi-agency working. “There was an overreliance on single agency processes with superficial joint working and joint decision making. This had very significant consequences.”
It said that professionals in Bradford had limited understanding what life was like for her, did not listen to wider family members and that the responses to safeguarding referrals “were significantly weakened by the lack of formal multi-agency child protection processes”.
In addition, it found an inadequate response to concerns of domestic abuse towards Smith from Brockhill and that assessments by children’s social care “were not fit for purpose”, at a time of “turmoil” within Bradford’s children’s social care service, in 2020.
The panel, which is also responsible for analysing serious child protection incidents reported by councils, said that what happened to Arthur and Star were not isolated incidents and their deaths reflected wider problems in child protection practice. It identified two key lessons from the cases and its wider learning from safeguarding concerns:
Multi-agency arrangements for safeguarding children are too fragmented, with inadequate information sharing making it “extremely difficult” to build and maintain an accurate picture of what life is like for the child, it said.
A need for “sharper specialist child protection skills and expertise, especially in relation to complex risk assessment and decision making; engaging reluctant parents; understanding the daily life of children; and domestic abuse”.
The panel called for the creation of multi-agency expert child protection units to tackle the two key failings it identified in both cases: inadequate joint working and a need for sharper child protection skills and expertise.
The review identified a critical fortnight for Arthur in April 2020. On 14 April, Hughes and Arthur went to stay with Hughes’s parents, after an argument with Tustin, allegedly linked to a fight between Arthur and Tustin’s son.
On 15 April, Hughes reported Tustin missing to the police, saying she had also expressed suicidal thoughts. When she was found by street triage team, including a nurse and a police officer, she declined a referral back to the community mental health team, but reported that Arthur had punched her son, prompting an argument with Hughes, in which he had pushed her son with his elbow.
The review found that both the alleged assault by Hughes on Tustin’s son and Tustin’s mental health should have prompted a referral to Solihull multi-agency safeguarding hub (MASH), in the context of the risks to the children in the household.
The police officer charged with locating Tustin when she went missing then visited Hughes’s parents’ house and found Arthur looking fit and healthy and observed Hughes to be a concerned and caring father. The same officer had broken into Tustin’s home, when looking for her, and found it clean and tidy, with age-appropriate toys – observations that turned out to be important in framing subsequent responses.
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