‘All they needed to do was listen to the victims,’ says MP

Child abuse victims’ voices were prevented from being heard because of excessive bureaucracy and labyrinthine systems.

That is the verdict of Rochdale’s MP, Simon Danczuk after the release of an independent report on child sexual exploitation issues in Rochdale.

Calling the report a “damning indictment” of a failed management culture, he said it was wrong that senior officers like the former chief executive, Roger Ellis, had been allowed to escape disciplinary action by taking early retirement.

He added that there should be systems in place to claw back their enormous pension funds, as there was now overwhelming evidence that some officers had presided over services that failed to protect children and were complicit in serious crimes.

“This report shows that there were alarm bells going off all over the place and they were ignored,” he said. “Senior officers turned a blind eye to child abuse and didn’t want to know. The perpetrators of these terrible crimes and some senior council officers have brought shame on our town.”

The report revealed that the former chief executive, Roger Ellis, “did not appear to be interested in children’s social care issues” and that there was no evidence that Ellis had any intention of investigating the events that led to high profile child sexual abuse cases coming to court. The report noted that he believed this to be the responsibility of the new chief executive, Jim Taylor.

It also identified “a lack of consistent senior leadership, or a lack of vision and direction in relation to child sexual exploitation (CSE)” and that frontline staff “did not know what to do about CSE and how to deal with it”.

Furthermore, it stated that social workers “within the service did not have a working knowledge of effective risk assessment”.

Mr Danczuk also slammed what he called “appalling complacency” after it emerged that senior managers viewed CSE as being “no more or less prevalent in Rochdale than in other local authorities”. At one point a senior officer is quoted as saying that they viewed CSE “as part of the combined evils that many children faced”.

“A combination of dismissive attitudes, a toxic culture that viewed rape victims as making lifestyle choices and excessive bureaucracy that was bereft of common sense allowed horrible abuse to go on in our Borough for far too long,” said Mr Danczuk.

He added that despite having a Safeguarding Children Board, a sexual exploitation working group and a case management group, the Council continued to ignore young girls’ cries for help. “They were obsessed with systems, processes and meetings. All they needed to do was listen to the victims,” he argued.

What has become very clear, he explained, was that the former chief executive had shown no leadership to get to grips with a terrible problem that was endemic in Rochdale.

“The Council now needs to tell us what the full package Roger Ellis and other implicated senior officers left with,” he said. “If Roger Ellis has one iota of decency he will return this money for the mess he left Rochdale in.”

Yet despite there being a long way to go to restore confidence in children’s services in Rochdale, Mr Danczuk said he had confidence in the current chief executive.

“Jim Taylor has a very difficult job but he has decided to grasp the nettle that his predecessor ignored,” he said. “He has inherited a completely dysfunctional children’s services department and it will take time to turn it around.”