After Baby P: the crisis in child foster care

Mary Wakefield talks to a courageous woman who blew the whistle on the deep systemic failures in the foster care service — and whose only reward was to be hounded and vilified

I spotted Sarah immediately, though I’d never seen her before and she was tucked in among the commuter crowds ebbing and flowing through Marylebone station. She walked differently from the rest, less preoccupied, more determined, and she carried, as she had said she would, a big black folder under her arm.

Sarah had told me about the contents of the folder already, so I knew what it contained: a detailed account of an injustice done to Sarah and her partner, John, by the private foster agency who employed them, and further evidence (if any more were needed after Baby P) that our vast, complicated national child-care industry is more concerned with saving face than with saving children from harm.

That black folder is on the desk beside me as I write and so I now know its full story. It begins in 2002 when Sarah and her partner made the decision to sign up with the newly opened Happiness agency; it details Sarah’s realisation of the dangerous mistakes being made by Happiness, mistakes that put children in harm’s way, and then — almost worse — the agency’s refusal to admit their mistakes and their subsequent and successful attempt to destroy Sarah and John’s reputations.

Sarah’s story reads like a Carl Hiaasen novel — big, unscrupulous company tries to squash brave, truth-telling heroine. But in a novel, more often than not, the moral order remains intact — villains get their comeuppance. In reality, despite hundreds of letters, a dogged refusal to give up, the support of the police and of her local MP, Sarah has failed either to make Happiness admit their mistakes or clear her name.