David Floyd talks to top officers, political leaders and an opposition councillor after three young people died having been looked after by the council

Barnet Council's Colindale offices and (inset) leader Barry Rawlings — Barnet Council’s Colindale offices and (inset) leader Barry Rawlings

On a Tuesday evening in November, Barnet councillors were surprised to receive an email from the council’s chief executive informing them that the borough would be featured in a Sky News documentary available that night.

That documentary, Unseen: A girl called Nonita told the story of a young woman, Nonita Grabovskyte, who had been in the council’s care, and had taken her own life shortly after her 18th birthday in December 2023. It was later revealed that two more young people had died shortly after leaving the council’s care in the past two years.

Since the documentary was broadcast, the council’s leadership has come under significant scrutiny, from within the borough and beyond, over both its role in the deaths of the young people and a perceived lack of transparency about what happened.

To understand the different perspectives, Barnet Post met the Labour administration’s political leadership and key officers responsible for children’s services, and also interviewed the deputy leader of the council’s Conservative opposition.

The impression from meeting the officers and political leaders is that, while they are clearly upset about the young people’s deaths and keen to improve the council’s approach, they also believe the Sky documentary did not give a full picture of what happened.

“The first thing I’d say is that the local authority’s been very open and, contrary to what may have been presented, really has, from the point of Nonita’s death, started that learning process,” explains the council’s executive director of children and families, John Anthony.

He emphasises that, following Nonita’s death, the council immediately looked at what could be learnt. He says: “The first thing that was undertaken was a reflection session and workshops, multi-agency workshops looking at all the processes of what happened, could things have been done differently, what was the role of particular agencies.”

The borough’s director of children’s social care, Brigitte Jordaan, explains that the council took a clear decision to take action in response to Nonita’s death. She says: “Although we didn’t have a statutory responsibility to do a learning review because she was 18, we decided to because we recognised that we needed to look at what needed to be improved and changed out of what we knew.”

The officers feel that the fact that the council went beyond its legal duties in seeking to learn from what happened is something that has got lost, both in terms of what was covered in the Sky documentary, and the reaction to it.

Outlining some of the changes that have been implemented over the past two years, Jordaan explains that the process as young people in care reach their 18th birthday involves a plan being developed for each young person in which: “We look at concrete decisions around what organisations can be brought in to support them, thinking about whether this is some part of adult social care that could be involved to make sure that there’s no time that our young people are uncertain about who’s going to be their support network.”

The council’s political leaders feel similarly misunderstood. Cabinet member for family friendly Barnet, Pauline Coakley-Webb, begins by pointing out that “what was done followed exactly all the procedures that happened over the previous 14 years when we were not in administration”.

However, she goes on to explain that from now on “when there’s any notifiable incident or death” the administration will inform the leader of the opposition, their deputy and the opposition’s lead member for the service area.

She says: “We’re trying to tighten up at every angle and make sure that wherever possible, where it’s permissible in terms of confidentiality, that we can keep people updated,” before adding: “None of this happened ever before but it’s what we’ve decided to do.”

Both Cllr Coakley-Webb and council leader Barry Rawlings are concerned about balancing the need for confidentiality with the need for scrutiny.

Cllr Rawlings adds: “I’m worried that sometimes we might lose the fact that some young people have died if it’s put into a political pulpit. That feels a bit wrong to me but there were certainly lessons to learn, we can certainly do things differently.”

In terms of the council’s approach to learning from what happened, Cllr Rawlings says: “I’m quite satisfied that what we’ve done is right and we’ve acted in the right way.”

However, Lucy Wakeley, deputy leader of the opposition Conservative group views the situation very differently.

She explains that, while watching the documentary: “I was just really shocked, really upset, I think I was in tears at points.”

Afterwards, she says: “I felt a lot of anger about the fact that this huge thing, this tragic case had happened, clearly a lot of work had been done by officers in the background, but it had never come to us, and we’d never been given the chance to scrutinise what had gone wrong”.

Cllr Wakeley says, along with other members of the Conservative group, she takes the role that councillors have as ‘corporate parent’ to the borough’s looked after children very seriously. She says: “What’s the point in having these corporate parenting roles if, when real things go wrong, we’re not told?”

The single biggest point of disagreement between Labour and the Conservatives is over whether or not Labour followed a longstanding process for responding to such incidents.

Cllr Wakeley says not: “I don’t know what protocol they’re talking about, because this isn’t written down.”

She adds: “Fundamentally councillors are elected to represent our residents and their views, how can we do that when we’re not being told about really important things that are happening? That’s the discussion we were trying to have and Labour have come at it from a very defensive point of view.”

A particular source of frustration to the opposition councillor is that members receive extensive information to read before meetings but this apparently does not cover the really important issues. She says: “We get a lot of these reports that spend a long time talking about how brilliant officers have been – and I don’t doubt that we have lots of fantastic officers and they are doing fantastic work – but it’s hundreds and hundreds of pages, and they don’t always get to the substance of it.”

The whole affair seems to have left a significant lack of trust between opposing parties at the town hall. I ask Cllr Wakeley whether she’s confident that councillors would have found out about the deaths of the three young people if the Sky documentary had not been broadcast. She responds: “I don’t think we would have been told at all.”

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