Mark Watkin, Opposition Spokesperson for Children’s Services  met yesterday with Jenny Coles, Director of Children’s Services and Sue Williams, Operations Director of Safeguarding to  establish whether anything like what happened in Rotherham could be happening in Hertfordshire.  In their judgement and also the judgement of the Hertfordshire Police the answer is no.

One of the key factors in Rotherham was  that the Council used a large number of privately run homes as they are a relatively cheap way of housing teenagers  and failed to supervise what was going on in them. HCC uses far more foster carers looking after single  young people so co-ordinated abuse on the Rotherham scale is much more difficult to set up.

Mark comments “While one can never say that organised sexual abuse of children in Hertfordshire could never happen, I can say that the Children’s Services and the Police work extremely closely  to prevent anything like this happening to our children. I will continue to press the service’s leaders to ensure that there is no complacency in Children’s Services and I will challenge the status quo when it is not up to scratch.”