Last year, two children were taken into care partly because their mother refused to co-operate with social workers. The pre-teenage children were said to have witnessed domestic violence against the mother, by a former partner who kept on visiting, to have missed a number of days of school; and to have had to suffer their mother making comments that damaged their “self-esteem”.

This is the kind of case that social workers have to navigate all the time. It is possible to agree that the mother had forfeited her right to be a parent. It is equally possible to feel that the answer might have been to get an injunction against the partner, and to help the mother to cope - since the children were never said to be at risk of injury - rather than to commit them to the hell of care.

I do not know every detail of this case. I mention it only because the local authority was Haringey, and social workers decided to remove the two children during the period that Baby P was living in torment. There seems to be no comparison between the gravity of the two cases. Baby P's mother co-operated with social workers - she was what is known in the trade as a “disguised compliant” - where Mrs X did not.

Documents on Haringey's website show that the council became concerned in 2006-07 about a £4.6million overspend: £2.3 million of that was in children's services. Is it possible that social workers making decisions that might add to the council's care bill found themselves influenced by the knowledge that it was in the red?

The council reduced its informal target for the number of children in care from 365 in March 2007 to 352 in March 2008. It also managed to reduce the per-head cost of children in its care. But it is plausible that budget concerns may have helped to tip the balance towards those social workers who wanted to give Baby P's mother another chance.

If the wrong children are being taken into care, time and money spent on them will be time and money lost from children in real danger. This week I received a note from a woman who claims that another council has spent two years “harassing” her and threatening to remove her children on grounds that she says are threadbare. “How”, she asks, “can they do that when other children are dying?” So how do local authorities decide which children to take into care?

This is not easy to answer, since there is so little public scrutiny of decision-making. But authorities around the country do seem to differ in the thresholds that they use for taking children into care. The Children's Act states that a child may be removed if there is “reasonable cause to suspect that a child is suffering, or likely to suffer, significant harm”. Harm is defined as ill-treatment, or the impairment of health or development. But “significant” is not defined, except to say that comparisons should be made with a “similar” child.

We can all agree that “significant harm” would include the kind of injuries sustained by Baby P. Whether it is worse to witness domestic abuse than to grow up in care is less clear-cut.

A report by Ofsted yesterday found that one in twelve care homes fails even to keep children safe - the most basic requirement that they should fulfil. And that almost a third of private fostering arrangements in local authorities are “inadequate” - a shocking figure.

Ofsted found that more babies have died from abuse than ministers have previously acknowledged - 282 children, mostly babies, died in the 17 months to the end of August. Many of these families were already known to social services. Those were preventable tragedies.

It also lambasted the failure to learn from the “serious case reviews” (SCRs) that are carried out when a child dies. It judged that 32 out of 92 reviews were inadequate: Ofsted-speak for truly bloody awful. The serious case review into the handling of Baby P's case, which was carried out by Haringey's director of children's services and exonerated the council, demonstrated total management failure.

So it is extraordinary that the Government refuses to let Lynne Featherstone, a local MP, see the review. She has been rebuffed by Ed Balls, the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, on the ground that public sector employees might be “unwilling to undertake SCRs if there was a risk they might be identified by publication” - even though the reviews do not name individuals. Mr Balls cites a 2006 decision by the Information Commissioner not to release a serious case review report, because it might have impeded professionals' free discussion of the issues involved. This effectively protects bureaucrats. In Haringey, the director of children's services clearly feels there is nothing to discuss.

Preventing the local MP from knowing what went wrong in Haringey, and why, is not the way to “learn lessons” or to “protect children”. It could cover up potential incompetence of such magnitude that it can only occur and recur in a service that is essentially secret.

Mr Balls has announced that every authority must set up a children's trust board, bringing different agencies together. Haringey has had one since 2004. It didn't save Baby P. These agencies must be made properly accountable, right from the case conference to the family court. We need to ask afresh what is meant by “significant harm”. Until that happens, some of the wrong children will continue to be taken into care.

The Liberal Democrat John Hemming said in the Commons yesterday that we need “accountability for judgment, more than process”. The threshold for deciding whether it is a Mrs X's children or a Baby P that most needs protection will always be subjective. That makes it imperative that decisions are transparent. The only people who should fear transparency are those with something to hide.

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