Children’s minister Edward Timpson has expressed “deep concerns” about a serious case review about four year old Hamzah Khan who lay dead in his Bradford home for almost two years.
Hamzah’s mother Amanda Hutton was jailed for 15 years in October after being found guilty of his manslaughter and neglecting five of her other children. Hamzah’s emaciated and decomposed body was discovered in his cot.
During Hutton’s trial it emerged tha the family, who were living in a state of total squalor, had been in contact with a range of agencies without anyone noticing the danger the children were in.
Speaking as the serious case review (SCR) into Hamzah’s death was published, Mr Timpson said it had failed to fully explain “missed opportunities to protect children in the house”.
The SCR concluded that Hamzah had been “invisible for almost a lifetime.”
Mr Timpson has written to Professor Nick Frost, chair of the Bradford Safeguarding Children Board, setting out a series of questions about the contact between various agencies and the family that he believes needs answering.
He wrote:
“It is tragic beyond words that by the time a health visitor did trigger concerns about the whereabouts of the younger children in the household, who were missing from health and education services altogether, Hamzah Khan was already dead.”
By the time police entered the four-bedroom house in September 2011, alcoholic Hutton, mother of eight children, was living in “breathtakingly awful” conditions with five of those children and Hamzah’s mummified remains.
At a press conference in Bradford Professor Frost defenced his report:
“It’s not a whitewash. I will undertake the action requested by the minister. We are totally committed to transparency in this case.”
Our Home Affairs Correspondent Darshna Soni writes:
Professor Nick Frost, the Chair of Bradford's Safeguarding Board, came to Bradford this morning to present his serious vase review into Hamzah Khan's death. Instead, he was faced with dozens of questions about why the government had been briefing us journalists against his report.
"Systems let Hamzah down." Some of the phrases and themes identified in the SCR are depressingly familiar, including perhaps the most overused; "Lessons will be learnt."
There was a lot of frustration at the press conference today, as the review was presented to journalists. No individuals were singled out for blame. Reporters wanted to know why. The panel suggested the little boy had "fallen off the radar," that he was invisible because his mother refused to engage with the authorities.
But in fact, Amanda Hutton did talk to police officers, social workers and health visitors.
And just as the SCR was being presented to us, the Department of Education was briefing journalists that it was, in effect, not worth the paper it was written on.
The family was known to all the main agencies, partly due to a long history of violence Hutton suffered at the hands of Hamzah’s father, Aftab Khan.
In 2008, while being interviewed by police about an assault on Hutton that led to a conviction for Mr Khan, Hamzah’s father raised concern about the welfare of Hamzah, then aged three. Mr Khan also claimed that he would contact social services. In the same month a judge granted an injunction forcing Aftab Khan to stay away from Hutton.
Speaking to Channel 4 News Mr Khan insisted that “Amanda Hutton had twisted the authorities around her fingers.”