John Hammond
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John Hammond
@jhammonddesign
Illustrator | Here for the footy and metal🤘 | Former northerner | EFC
Chris Walker, the lawyer representing the families of Bebe King, Elsie Dot Stancombe, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, has called for individual accountability across five state agencies: Prevent, Lancashire Police, Lancashire Social Services, CAMHS, and FCAMHS. He has described their collective failings as “wholly unacceptable” and “catastrophic,” argued that the attack was “predictable and preventable,” and warned that he may publicly name individuals unless appropriate disciplinary action is taken. He has also criticised what he describes as a “merry-go-round” of referrals and hand-offs, and the inappropriate use of the perpetrator’s autism as an “excuse” for failing to escalate concern. Walker’s position is rooted in the profound and understandable grief of the families he represents. The Southport Inquiry’s Phase 1 report, published on 13 April 2026 and chaired by Sir Adrian Fulford, is clear in its central conclusion: this “terrible event could have been, and should have been, prevented.” The report further finds it highly likely that the attack would not have occurred if agencies had managed the escalating risk more effectively from December 2019 onwards, and if the perpetrator’s parents had shared the full extent of his increasingly serious behaviour. The report identifies a series of interconnected systemic failures: the absence of clear risk ownership across agencies; poor information sharing and fragmented case management; repeated misinterpretation or downplaying of concerning behaviour, including in relation to autism and neurodiversity; inadequate oversight of online activity; and parental failure to disclose relevant information. It describes an “inappropriate merry-go-round of referrals, assessments, case closures and hand-offs” in which responsibility for managing the risk was repeatedly passed between agencies without any single body maintaining sustained ownership of the overall threat. However, while these findings establish serious systemic failure and multiple missed opportunities for escalation, the step from this analysis to the public naming of identifiable individuals is not clearly supported by the Inquiry’s broader framing of responsibility, and risks oversimplifying the nature of that failure. “Naming and shaming” individuals leads to a set of well-documented problems, with limited evidence that it improves safeguarding outcomes and significant evidence of unintended consequences. The Inquiry explicitly notes that agency staff “acted in good faith and with good intentions,” and that the range of decisions taken reflected the kind of variation and constraint one would expect in complex multi-agency safeguarding work. It also indicates that many judgments, particularly those influenced by misunderstandings of autism, neurodiversity, and risk presentation, were consistent with prevailing professional frameworks and guidance at the time. This does not eliminate or excuse the possibility of error, but it does caution against interpreting those errors as isolated moral or professional failings detached from systemic context. Prevent’s handling of referrals further illustrates this complexity. The cases were closed in part because the perpetrator’s “fixation with extreme violence” did not fit the prevailing Prevent framework, which was primarily oriented towards identifying ideological radicalisation. The Phase 1 report highlights this as a structural limitation in threshold and remit, and Phase 2 of the Inquiry is explicitly tasked with examining in greater depth how non-ideological violent fixation should be assessed within multi-agency safeguarding systems. Walker is right to argue that the attack was preventable in a systemic sense: the Inquiry clearly indicates that better coordination, clearer risk ownership, and more effective escalation pathways would very likely have altered the trajectory of events. However, preventability in a complex distributed system does not translate directly into individual culpability in a legally or analytically straightforward sense. The information relevant to risk was fragmented across multiple agencies; no single professional held the full picture; and responsibility was structurally diffused through overlapping thresholds, referral systems, and organisational boundaries. In that context, attributing decisive causal responsibility to specific individuals risks implying a level of coordination and visibility that did not exist in practice. Publicly naming individuals on the basis of these findings would also carry significant risks for future safeguarding practice. It risks personalising what the Inquiry repeatedly characterises as a systemic failure: one in which “the failure, because it belonged to everyone, belonged to no one.” It may also encourage defensive practice, where professionals become more inclined to minimise exposure or transfer responsibility rather than escalating ambiguous risk concerns. In sectors already facing recruitment and retention challenges, particularly in child protection and mental health services, a climate of retrospective public shaming may further discourage experienced practitioners from remaining in or entering high-risk roles. History offers a sobering precedent. Following the tragic Baby P case in 2007, intense public and media-driven naming and shaming of individual social workers and managers were associated with well-documented negative outcomes across child protection services. Morale among frontline staff plummeted, with surveys reporting a marked and widespread decline, particularly in child protection teams. Recruitment and retention problems, already serious, became worse: experienced practitioners left the field, services grew increasingly reliant on short-term agency staff, and many areas struggled to attract suitable candidates amid a climate of fear. The case also fostered defensive practice, with professionals more inclined to over-intervene, minimise ambiguous risks, or accelerate hand-offs to avoid personal exposure: precisely the “merry-go-round” of referrals and buck-passing that the Southport Inquiry condemns. Publicly naming individuals in the Southport context risks repeating these patterns in already-stretched services (child protection, mental health, and Prevent) where recruitment crises and high workloads are longstanding. Rather than strengthening prevention, it could deepen the very cultural problems Sir Adrian Fulford identifies as central to the failure: diffused responsibility and a reluctance to own risk. The Southport Inquiry makes 67 recommendations aimed at addressing these structural weaknesses, including clearer assignment of risk ownership through lead responsibility models, improved information-sharing systems, enhanced training on neurodiversity and violence risk, and cultural change to reduce institutional “buck-passing.” Sir Adrian Fulford describes ending this fragmented “culture of no responsibility” as central to preventing future tragedies. Accountability in the wake of public inquiries is rarely a binary choice between systemic reform and individual sanction. Both can coexist: disciplinary processes may be appropriate where specific breaches of duty are identified, while the primary focus must remain on implementing structural reforms that reduce the likelihood of recurrence. The concern with naming individuals in the manner suggested is not that accountability should be avoided, but that it risks shifting attention from systemic learning to symbolic attribution of blame in a way that may not reflect the distributed nature of the failure identified. The families are entitled to truth, transparency, and meaningful change. The public inquiry process, which was independent, detailed, and chaired by a High Court judge, has already exposed a level of systemic failure that demands serious reform. The most durable form of justice for Bebe, Elsie, and Alice lies in ensuring that the Inquiry’s recommendations are implemented fully and urgently, and that a genuinely coherent system of risk ownership is created so that no child is lost because responsibility was assumed to lie elsewhere. Public naming and shaming may offer a sense of immediate moral resolution, but the Inquiry’s findings suggest that the more difficult task is structural: rebuilding systems so that fragmented responsibility is replaced with clear, continuous accountability. The central lesson of the report is not that failure can be located in a small number of individuals, but that it emerged from an architecture of risk management that allowed responsibility to diffuse until it effectively disappeared. Fixing that architecture, which will involve hard choices about sufficient funding paid for by higher taxes, is the necessary condition for preventing recurrence. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…
Friedkin Group acquired Everton with negative goodwill of £473 million, which effectively means they paid minus £473 million for the net assets, as inheriting such a poorly run business under Moshiri.
Our campaign has just paid a visit to Keir Starmer. Get him out on May 7th! ⚠️
