At Wednesday night’s ‘lively’ full council meeting, Labour councillor, Geoff Lumley called for the resignation of two councillors over the damning Ofsted report over ‘inadequate’ protection of children released earlier in the week.
During members’ questions, Cllr Lumley called on Cllr George Cameron, chair of Children and Young People Scrutiny Panel to resign.
“Adequate, adequate, adequate, adequate, and now inadequate”
He cited the outcome of the last five Ofsted inspections on child protection as “adequate, adequate, adequate, adequate, and now inadequate”, going on to explain that he’d been exploring the performance of Scrutiny in regard to Children’s Services with colleague Deborah Gardiner.
He ran through summaries of previous inspection reports and the responses by those on the CYP Scrutiny Panel, finishing that in July 2012 Cllr Cousins had reported “tremendous progress”.
“Hang your head in shame and resign tonight”
He said to Cllr Cameron, “given the absolute indictment of child protection, are you proud of the sort of scrutiny regime you have been running Cllr Cameron for the last four years for this authority, or are you going to hang your head in shame and resign tonight?”
As chair of Scrutiny, Cllr Churchman asked for Cllrs Cameron and Cousins to respond.
“We did our best to make sure questions were answered”
Cllr Cameron asked Cllr Lumley to remember that the Ofsted regime had changed.
“We have done what we felt, we thought we done right, anyone else in our position would have done the same. We did our best to make sure questions were answered” said Cllr Cameron.
Cllr Lumley asked whether it was the role of the Chair of CYP Scrutiny Panel to challenge policy, the ask questions, to be inquisitive or is it just to support the Cabinet member in their decisions?
Cllr Cameron replied that the item add been added to the next meeting and that challenging does take place.
“No compliance” between councillors
Cllr Cousins denied there was any compliance between herself and Cllr Cameron. She told members that officers had gone through 700 cases over the previous weekend, had taken immediate action in any cases where there was a risk and assured members that there were no children presently at risk on the Isle of Wight.
She went on to claim that the report contained no criticism of the political leadership, something which had been challenged by Cllr Welsford.
“I will do my best to put it right”
Cllr Cousins said, “I have taken responsibility for this, I have been asked by a number of people whether I intend to resign and the answer is no, because I already gave notice last summer that I do not intend to stand again, and basically my task now working with the officers and the people that we’ve appointed to make sure that we move this forward is to get something in place that we can turn this around completely. There is no way I could have known the quality of some of the case practice that was going on.”
She finished by saying, “I regret was was found and I will do my best to put it right.”
“No sense of shame”
Following the meeting Cllr Lumley told On The Wight, “Quite clearly Cllr Cousins has no sense of shame about this Ofsted report and will continue to blame everyone and everything else except her own political leadership of Children’s Services.
“As for Cllr Cameron, I read out a litany of failures by his Scrutiny Panel – all to be found on the record. Yet he didn’t not appear to understand at all that scrutiny involves a lot more responsibility than cosying up to the Cabinet Member.”
Image: otakuchick under CC BY 2.0
