Angry social workers informed Ed Balls, Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, much of their time was spent on paperwork to satisfy government initiatives and to prop up “ineffective” inspections. This prevented them from seeing vulnerable children.

They accused Ofsted of forcing social workers to produce numerous extra reports and figures instead of meeting families and doing their job.

Mr Balls said that the Baby P case showed that failures in Haringey had nothing to do with record-keeping but were due to poorly co-ordinate interventions.

To loud applause, Hilton Dawson, the chief executive of the British Association of Social Workers and a former Labour MP, told Ed Balls that…

“This response simply won’t do. This is not an issue about good case-work recording. This is not about good communication. What social workers are having to do 80 per cent of their time is serve a bureaucratic machine, which actually has nothing to do with good social work and has everything to do with keeping a really ineffective inspection regime operating in a way that does not support really effective work with children and families,”

Mr Balls had first come under fire from Jim Couchman a former Tory MP, presently Oxfordshire County Council’s cabinet member for adult services, Mr Couchman said.

“The response of your department to Victoria Climbié and more latterly Baby Peter has been to impose a very heavy-handed bureaucratic system of records,”

“Will you stand back now because that has led to our social workers having to spend far too much time in front of the screen and far too little time out there with the families that need your help?”

Mr Balls said he would not and went on to say.

“The idea that social workers who are dealing with complex cases of potential child abuse or neglect wouldn’t be making records or keeping track of what they do doesn’t seem to make much sense”

He went on to say

“I don’t accept that if we somehow went back to a day in which we didn’t keep records, somehow we’d improve child protection.”

Mr Balls acknowledged that more flexibility was needed in the way information was recorded, and said that would be introduced. But blaming problems on central direction and targets was “missing the point”, he said.