SOCIAL services at the council accused of failing to protect Shannon Matthews missed the chance to prevent the murder of a four-year-old boy by his violent father.

Complaints were made by one of Christopher Hawkins’s young teenage daughters that he was violent, but nobody from Kirklees council’s specialist safeguarding team spoke to her or her siblings because it was felt they could protect themselves.

Hawkins went on to kill his son Ryan, 4, and stabbed his 14-year-old daughter Donna more than a dozen times at his home near Huddersfield.

The disclosure, contained in an executive summary of a report issued by Kirklees Safeguarding Children Board, comes as the council faces an inquiry by the board into its conduct in the Matthews case.

Some of Matthews’s siblings had been placed on a child protection register but were taken off despite concerns about violence in the family and the fact that their mother Karen seemed unable to put their interests ahead of her own.

Kirklees council has said it will cooperate with the review, but it has now emerged that the authority and other agencies also exhibited failures in the run-up to Ryan’s murder in September last year.

Hawkins, a 48-year-old sheet-metal worker who had been allowed to have the children with him despite being on bail for a serious sexual assault at knifepoint, was convicted of murder and attempted murder in March this year.

Accusations that Hawkins was physically abusive had been made on two occasions by Donna or her sister Natalie, who was 15 at the time of the attack. But Kirklees council’s safeguarding and specialist provision service failed even to talk to any of the children.

The safeguarding board’s serious case review panel said this failure was “probably because both the older children were in their teens and were thought to be able to effect some self-protection”.

The report, which stressed nobody except Hawkins was to blame for Ryan’s death, added: “It was significant that domestic violence did not seem to have been considered as a risk factor.

“At no point did any agency consider the significant dangers of unsupervised contact between the children and the father.

“At the time of the incident the parents had separated and there were serious charges against the father of rape, false imprisonment and use of a weapon.”

- The Conservatives last night turned up the pressure on the Baby P scandal as Michael Gove, the shadow children’s secretary, issued a declaration of no confidence in Lord Laming, the former chief inspector of social services who is conducting an independent review.

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