It highlights the existence of large numbers of “horrifically” failed “lone children”, abused by their families and “unlawfully” turned down for help by children’s services.

The 400-page report by the Centre for Social Justice carries the testimony of 50 child protection experts from across the country as well as 20 children “abhorrently failed” by social services in London.

It concludes that the system is beyond repair and calls for a Royal Commission to oversee a “huge step change” and a “radical redesign”.

Two years in the making and described as “one of the most detailed single reports that the CSJ has ever undertaken”, it reveals:

Children brought up by drug addicts repeatedly begging social workers to remove them to a safe place, but ignored;

A system that treats care needs according to the workload their budget can support rather than the needs of the child;

Lawyers aghast at the machinery of child protection more designed to prevent children getting the help they need rather than providing it.

It paints a picture of some local authorities “operating unscrupulous and illegal practices” and going to “incredulous lengths” to withhold support from desperately vulnerable children to keep within tightened budgets.

The findings will come as an uncomfortable challenge to the Prime Minister and education secretary Michael Gove, whose department is responsible for child protection, not least because it comes from the right-leaning think-tank founded by another government minister, Iain Duncan Smith.

Christian Guy, director of the CSJ, said: “This strained system is well beyond fixing through easy political commitments or some extra public money. That is why we are calling for a Royal Commission to advise on its wholesale rescue and redesign.”

He likened the task ahead to that faced by Victorian campaigners of the nineteenth century who exposed the horrific adversity of children left orphaned and destitute by slum life. “In 2014 our challenge is to expose and remedy the conditions faced by the thousands of vulnerable children not cared for by their biological parents, nor by social services. Through no fault of their own they are our lone children, and it is time we did them justice. They deserve better.”

Vulnerable children left to fend for themselves by broken system

Local authorities are operating “unscrupulous and illegal practices” to prevent children at risk getting the help they need, according to a groundbreaking report released exclusively to the Evening Standard today.

The report by the Centre for Social Justice paints a shocking picture of a child protection system “overwhelmed”, “in crisis”, “at breaking point” and no longer fit for service. It talks about social workers being told by bosses to downgrade “children at risk” to “children in need”, because the latter category requires a far weaker and less costly intervention from the local authority. Children’s safety is being illegally compromised in order to meet squeezed budgets, they say, and some local authorities are setting their thresholds artificially high to avoid giving young people the support they need.

Two years in the making and running to 400 pages, the report is the result of 50 expert interviews and a forensic analysis of the cases of 20 young Londoners who were failed by the care system and forced to endure “horrific challenges” before being helped by the charity Kids Company.

It reveals systemic failure, a box-ticking culture and that the voluntary sector is too often left to pick up the pieces. It concludes with a call for a “huge step change” to address “abhorrent failures” in the system and calls for a Royal Commission to bring about “the wholesale and radical redesign” of child protection and statutory mental health services.

This excoriating indictment, coming from the right-of-centre independent think-tank founded by Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith, will put a rocket under Education Secretary Michael Gove, whose department is also responsible for child protection. Ofsted also comes in for severe criticism for glossing over problems and “over how it conducts its assessment of [social] services and reaches its conclusions”.

The report, which is due for wider publication tomorrow, does not name the offending local authorities, choosing to make the broader point of a system that is generally buckling. “Some local authorities are operating unscrupulous and unlawful practices, flagrantly contravening the legislation which provides for the protection of young people,” it said. “We were left incredulous by the lengths to which some are going, either completely to withhold or restrain services from being provided. Our evidence demonstrates a staggering lack of accountability by local authorities.”

CSJ director Christian Guy said: “There is a large group of young people whose families are falling apart because of violence, addiction or mental health problems but who are not regarded as reaching the threshold for statutory support services. These children are not in care, nor are they being cared for by their biological parents. They are our country’s ‘lone children’.”

Pouring more money into a dysfunctional system is not the answer, the CSJ insist. Instead it is time to consider a radical overhaul.

“We are calling for a Royal Commission to advise on the wholesale redesign of social care and statutory mental health services for vulnerable children to report by the end of 2017. The existence of lone children is a reality that must be addressed.” Successive governments have privately taken the view that child protection services are a hornet’s nest and “too big to fix”, but the CSJ hopes this report will be a game-changer.

Poignantly, the author of the report is Adele Eastman, a solicitor and policy analyst who was the fiancée of Tom ap Rhys Pryce, murdered eight years ago by youths for his mobile phone. Ms Eastman has spent two years investigating cases where social services have failed to protect lone children, many of whom grow up to become criminals.

Nobody knows exactly how many “lone children” there are, which is itself part of the problem, but the CSJ talks of “large numbers” while child protection experts estimate tens of thousands in London and several hundred thousand country-wide.

The CSJ findings are backed by an NSPCC study, How Safe Are Our Children?, which reported 520,000 child victims of maltreatment in the UK of whom just 11 per cent were on child protection plans. “For every child subject to a child protection plan or on a child protection register, we estimate another eight have suffered maltreatment,” it said. 

The NSPCC report was billed as “the most comprehensive picture yet” and found that the majority of maltreated children are either unknown to children’s services or being turned away.

“If children’s social services were to become aware of just one quarter of maltreated children, the number of children subject to child protection plans would triple,” it said. “The resources required for this would be significant, an additional £360 million to £490 million in public spending.”

Lisa Harker, co-author of the NSPCC report, said: “What this tells us is that the system we have to protect children is akin to an emergency service, that we are only dealing with the tip of the iceberg. If we are serious about wanting to prevent abuse and neglect of children, we have to admit the system is failing and rethink our approach.”

Other child protection experts are speaking out, too. Ray Jones, professor of social work at Kingston University and St George’s, University of London, and a former director of social services, said: “Things have seriously deteriorated in the last 10 years.

“I see it through my work with Ofsted where my job is to oversee child protection improvement. The whole point of the system is to respond to early warnings, to pick out children at risk and help them before they fall off the cliff, but for a child to get help today they have to be in much greater difficulty than ever before. Social services are so stretched, they are reduced to picking up the pieces at the bottom of the cliff. They are at, and in some cases beyond, the point of breakdown.”

A senior social worker with 28 years’ experience told the Standard: “The threshold for child protection has shifted according to the priorities of the management, not of the children. Because the service is rationed and overwhelmed, we slice and dice to manage the workload.

“Nobody talks about it, but this is how councils escape their responsibilities. It means the system cannot do what it claims to do — meet the needs of children. Budgets are met but children at risk are left to fend for themselves.  It is utterly unconscionable.”