Rotherham council leader asks ministers for help punishing grooming failures
The leader of Rotherham Council's asking the government for help in holding former employees to account for grooming scandal failings
Last updated 18th Oct 2017
Hallam can exclusively reveal the leader of Rotherham Council's asking the government for help in holding former employees to account for failings during the grooming scandal.
Councillor Chris Read's written to ministers asking for a change in employment law so public bodies have a way of punishing former staff members for overseeing big failures.
It's after six reports into the town's grooming scandal last month found there's nothing the authority can do to hold staff to account who've now left.
Chris says that was frustrating:
"The failings in Rotherham over a long period of time have been really clear and are as serious as they can be - so to discover that there's nothing else the council can do in terms of holding those senior members of staff to account is extremely frustrating.
"We're talking about people's lives being ruined. In Rotherham, it took a long time for that to come to light but we shouldn't let that be a reason to not hold people accountable for their failings. A lot of these people were well-paid for a long period of time and it's time they faced some accountability."
Councillor Read also wants the government to let councils compel former staff members to comply with investigations into failures - after several refused to answer questions from the six probes into the council's conduct during the child sexual exploitation scandal.
He says it should help the victims of abuse move on:
"Many of them will be coming through a process where we'll hopefully see their persecutors prosecuted but I think also people want to see that the institutions that fail them also have some accountability and it isn't enough to say those people have left, they don't even work here any more, so we can't even talk to them about it.
"If we had a member of staff now who was failing in their job, we'd be able to discipline that person, try to help them to get better and ultimately fire them. But if that person left the local authority some time ago and then it came to light that there were really serious failings in the service they were responsible for, there's nothing we can do about that."