It is not very difficult to predict the outcome of the official inquiry into the death of Baby P, the 17-month-old child who, like Victoria Climbié, died a horrific death in Haringey despite being well known to child protection services there.

The report will note with asperity the number of opportunities lost, many of them obvious even to non-specialists, to save Baby P. It will discover that procedures were not followed and forms were not filled in correctly. It will draw attention to the lack of communication between all the agencies involved in his so-called care, and point out the imperative need for better communication between those agencies. This it will do partly because it is true and partly because all official inquiries find, a priori as it were, that the problem that called them forth was partly caused by poor communication. As E.M.Forster put it a long time ago, “Only connect”.

The report will make scores, perhaps even hundreds, of recommendations (Lord Laming's report into the Climbié case made 108). In two, three or four years' time there will be another case somewhere in the country, and the lament will go up: the lessons were not learnt.

Why were the lessons not learnt, and why will they not be learnt? The answer is complex.

The first is that the work of child protection is very difficult, emotionally wearing and even dangerous. Staff turnover in the organisations that carry it out is often rapid. Most British paediatricians in training have experienced threats from parents or guardians, and 5 per cent have been assaulted sufficiently badly to need medical treatment. If this is true of doctors, who generally still retain a modicum of public respect, the situation of social workers is likely to be even worse. There is nothing like a constant fear of violence for undermining both the will to do anything and the judgment.

The second is that the fundamental purpose of the British public service is to provide a meal-and-mortgage-ticket for those who work in it, especially at management level. The ostensible purpose of an organisation is rarely its real purpose. I know this from my experience in the Health Service.

Thus, when a problem reveals itself, the response is a curious one, that is to say simultaneously one of work creation and work avoidance.

The work creation consists of instituting ever more “failsafe” and “best-practice” procedures, usually with all their associated paperwork, which are then bowed down to and worshipped like the Golden Calf. Of course, this creates the impression of terrific pressure of work, that can be relieved only by the employment of more and more staff with strange titles such as Compliance Manager and Best-Practice Co-ordinator.

This work creation is dialectically related to the work avoidance. So much effort goes into the procedure that no time, energy or inclination is left over to secure the alleged purpose of the procedure.

Documentation is its own justification; and a superstition now exists among the police, nurses, doctors, social workers, prison officers and no doubt others that nothing can go wrong if the forms are filled in correctly. Anyone who has been to a coroner's court lately will know that this is a superstition shared by many coroners.

When procedures become so exacting and time-consuming, the exercise of judgment is deemed neither necessary nor possible. Indeed, it will get you into trouble, because it is not part of the procedure. There is simply no contest between the most obvious reality, staring you in the face, and what the form says. The form says it all, and wins every time.

This is particularly the case when the staff have little confidence in themselves and will not be supported by their senior staff if anything goes wrong. As anyone who has worked for organisations such as child protection services knows, when something goes wrong the purpose of internal, and sometimes of external, inquiries is not to learn from experience, but to find the person lowest in the hierarchy who can be blamed. This is not an atmosphere conducive to the exercise of common sense.

We should not forget, either, that for many years successive British governments have been actively promoting by their policies social conditions in which child abuse, both physical and sexual, is more likely to occur.

In a land of serial stepfatherhood such as ours, we must expect dramatic cases of the most revolting cruelty to emerge more frequently than the absolute minimum number of cases that the wickedness of man dictates and probably, alas, makes unavoidable. No quantity of recommendations, social workers or even best-practice procedures will make up for this.

Will anyone benefit in the end from this terrible case, that causes one to tremble when one reads of it? Will Baby P have died in vain, as (apparently) did Victoria Climbié? Yes, there will be beneficiaries. I have little doubt that information technology consultants, asked whether they can come up with a system that will co-ordinate all the information about all the children at risk in the country, so that nothing like this ever happens again, will come up with a plan that will cost billions to install and that will not work. But they, the consultants, will have benefited enormously.

What seems to have been the stunning incompetence of the Haringey social services is actually by no means unusual in contemporary Britain; it is the dramatic and immediate human consequence of that incompetence that is unusual. We see the same incompetence in other spheres of endeavour every day.

Why would one expect child protection, which is inherently complex and difficult, to work properly in a country that cannot even organise its rubbish collections with reasonable expedition?

Theodore Dalrymple is a former prison doctor

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