“There can be no starker example of the failings of our social care system.”
Gareth Davies, Bureau Local Editor

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I’m Chrissie, one of the Bureau’s deputy editors, filling in for Franz this week while he takes a much-deserved break.

A couple of weeks ago, the Bureau’s kettle stopped working. If an army marches on its stomach, a newsroom is powered by its over-caffeinated nervous system, so it was a difficult discovery. (Luckily, Simon, a reporter who specialises in financial corruption, managed to fix it by “wiggling the lead a little bit”.)

But there’s one thing that drives us even more than caffeine: righteous anger. And unfortunately that’s never in short supply.

This week we published one of the most disturbing stories I’ve seen in my six years at the Bureau. A child, who we’re calling Alice, was taken into care and moved 300 miles from her family to escape sexual exploitation. There, she ends up being delivered into the care of two men in their 40s in an illegal children’s home. She underwent horrific abuse at the hands of those meant to protect her – people who were employed to keep her safe.

Our reporter Tom Wall has been working on this investigation for months. His meticulous unpicking of Alice’s ordeal – and how it was allowed to happen – has uncovered so many oversights.

One of the most serious relates to Liam Ramsay, one of the two men convicted of offences against Alice, including sexual activity with a child. He’s now been jailed for 11 years, but Tom discovered that there were warning signs about Ramsay’s suitability as a carer before he was made responsible for Alice’s wellbeing and safety. Those signs include him previously neglecting another vulnerable child in his care. 

A meeting of the Durham Safeguarding Children Partnership referred to an incident when Ramsay failed to get medical attention for a child with a head injury in a different illegal children’s home – a “substantiated allegation” of neglect. According to the people who ran the home Alice was placed in, neither the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS), which employers can use to run background checks on potential employees, nor Ramsay’s former company disclosed this information about him.

The disbelief, disgust and horror you might well be feeling when you hear this story – well, we feel it with you. Gareth Davies worked as Tom’s editor on this investigation and he’s encapsulated perfectly why he thinks this is an urgent wake up call over what he calls “Britain’s shadow care system”:

So what happens next? That’s a question we ask ourselves with an investigation like Tom’s. We start thinking about what could happen as a result of our journalism long before a reporter begins writing up their findings.

Impact is at the centre of our journalism. We want our pieces – and the people’s stories, data and other information they contain – to be useful off the page. We want to reveal facts that those with power or influence can use to make the world a better place.

Keen-eyed readers will have noticed a new box at the end of our investigations. Here we’ll update you on what we and others interested in the issue in hand are planning to do next. Sometimes, there will be ways for you to get involved too. This, for example, ran with our latest on Danny Bones, the AI far-right rapper:

But you don’t have to wait to get in touch with us. You can always reply to this or any other email from us with story tips, ideas or suggestions for what we should look into next. 

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Each week we reveal a fascinating fact from our reporting…

We won a legal battle to publish the name of a serial rapist as part of our family courts coverage in 2024. The ruling has been hailed as an “important decision” that shows it is possible to preserve the anonymity of people involved in highly sensitive cases while ensuring the family court process is not used by perpetrators to further their abuse or avoid scrutiny.

There are strict rules about protecting the names of parents involved in family proceedings in order to preserve the privacy of their children.

Former soldier Kristoffer Paul Arthur White had made an application to the court to spend more time with his child. But because it had previously been reported in the press that White had been convicted and jailed in 2011 for raping a teenager, we argued that there were strong public interest reasons for identifying him in relation to the family proceedings.

Reporters Hannah Summers and Suzanne Martin made a joint application to name the offender, stating that his dangerous behaviour was not limited to a domestic setting and the public interest demanded that he be identified.

Read more here. 

One of our newsroom’s favourite tools is a freedom of information (FOI) request. We LOVE them. It’s a tool any of us – or any of you – can use to request information from a UK public body, and by law they have to respond. It means a simple email can unlock a hoard of useful stuff. (If you’d like to dig through some data yourself, What Do They Know is a great repository for FOIs made in the UK.)

On Tuesday we published a story that shows just how revealing a well-placed FOI can be. Andrew Wasley, our chief environment correspondent, revealed how the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) had been secretly lobbying the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs over antibiotic rules.

What Andrew Wasley doesn’t know about industrial farming in the UK isn’t worth knowing. But hopefully, we all know that taking antibiotics when we don’t need them isn’t a good idea. Doing this, or even failing to complete the full course of treatment, can contribute to antimicrobial resistance, the situation when bacteria and other bugs stop responding to antibiotics. 

It’s the same for animals. On farms, where overcrowding and sometimes poor living conditions coexist, disease can spread quickly. So farmers will use antibiotics to try and control outbreaks. The issue comes when using the drugs preventatively to deal with potential infections.

In the EU, there are tight restrictions on how farmers can treat their animals with antibiotics, because resistance can develop among livestock too, threatening the health of both animals and humans.

The paper we’ve seen from the NFU to the UK government shows the union arguing that tougher rules on medicating farm animals “can act as a serious barrier to animal health and welfare, preventing the rapid treatment of a flock or herd of animals exposed to disease”. It wants the UK to keep the right for farmers to treat the whole herd or flock even if just some animals have been diagnosed with disease.

Critics argue that this overuse of antibiotics contributes to their reduced effectiveness when we need them most, and one has called the NFU’s lobbying disappointing.

The lobbying was aimed at influencing Defra officials who are negotiating with the EU on a new trade deal for animal products. So, we asked the government for a response. A spokesperson told us that trade negotiations were “ongoing” and that they will “set out further details when they conclude later this year”.

We’re eager to find out how these negotiations end, and will make sure you know the outcome as soon as we do.