24 June (Part 1) - Bexley council still trying to dodge questions on their failure to a prevent child murder
On November 5th last year Michael Barnbrook was told by cabinet member Philip Read that
he was not going to answer Mick’s question
to council because he had once stood alongside Nick Griffin when it was the only high profile party for those who
believed that getting out of the EU was the country’s top priority. Mick’s
association with the BNP came to a sticky end after they discovered that he had
reported Griffin to the police for a variety of financial irregularities.
Ironically someone who tried to bring down the BNP from the inside is now barred from joining UKIP.
However all that is a digression; the fact is that councillor
Philip Read was desperate to dodge Michael’s question because it was about
Bexley council’s shame at allowing a three year old (Rhys Lawrie) to be murdered under their
nose in spite of reports from concerned medical staff and school teachers. In
those circumstances any excuse will do.
If the boy’s grandfather was telling this tale it would go something like this…
• After the murder Bexley council wrote a report which appeared to
be incorrectly dated to mask their neglect.
• The police were prevailed upon to state death by
natural causes despite the boy having suffered 39 separate injuries.
•
When many months later Bexley police could not hold their natural causes line
any longer a 16 year old lad who suffered from educational problems was
prevailed upon to take the rap.
• The paramedics who said that the boy was not at the murder scene when
they were called to the lifeless body but only arrived later were not allowed to be
witnesses at the subsequent trial.
• There were various stories involving school release times and bus
timetables that strongly supported the paramedic’s statement.
• The
police allowed the mother to enter her own house - the murder scene - and
scrub it clean from top to bottom overnight.
• The mother should have been suspected because she was on the record -
but not apparently Bexley council’s - as admitting she was liable to harm the
child and had been sectioned before moving to Erith.
• To have charged the mother would have exposed Bexley council’s
failures at a time when Haringey and Baby Peter was still making headlines.
Of the eight points above six are facts one can read in various reports and the other two
are easily deduced from those papers and the case is still rattling around various
courts and agencies while the grandfather pursues his quest for justice.
Meanwhile Mick Barnbrook put a modified version of his original question to the
council for their next meeting on 15th July. Unsurprisingly it was rejected again but it did
come with a lengthy explanation from Will Tuckley. Lengthy but not
comprehensive, a lot went unanswered.
One of Mick’s points is that Bexley council fixed the Serious Case Review by
choosing for its chairman a former head of Bexley council’s Children’s Services
Department. Mr. Tuckley would have us believe that is not true because the
former Bexley Director was chosen by the Bexley Safeguarding Children’s Board
- as if Bexley council has no input to the BSCB. Yesterday’s
People Scrutiny Committee meeting Agenda (foot of Page 14) revealed that Bexley
council has just appointed a new one.
“Jane Shuttleworth has been appointed to the role of Bexley Safeguarding
Children’s Board Chairman.”
Bexley council regards the suppression of Mick’s probing to be so important to
its reputation that it has published
a rebuttal to his unanswered question on its website.
Mick of course is not put off by such things, he has called his colleagues and
advisers to a meeting to discuss his plan to report a senior officer at Bexley
council to the police for perverting justice. His case will I imagine be based
on the fact that the Serious Case Review was not truly independent.
The case is riddled with inconsistencies;
below is one not previously published. The police discovered a reference to an Initial Assessment among Bexley’s
files, the council that claimed not to know about Rhys Lawrie. The
Social Worker whose name appeared on it couldn’t remember either Rhys or his
family. Very conveniently Bexley’s police didn’t think that its existence blew a pretty big hole in Bexley
council’s defence.
Click image for source PDF.