Herefordshire Council social services separated twins despite expert warnings

Children's services in Herefordshire have been criticised for a number of years

Twins were wrongly split up for adoption after social workers altered an expert report warning of the harm of separation.

BBC Panorama has been speaking to families affected by struggling social services in Herefordshire.

Three-year-old twins from an abusive household were separated despite an expert warning that this would trigger a "detrimental" sense of loss.

Herefordshire Council apologised for its "very serious failings".

To protect identities, all names in this article have been changed.

It is against the law to report family court proceedings, where decisions are made about child protection cases brought by local authorities.

However, reporter Louise Tickle has been granted rare permission by a High Court to interview families seriously affected by decisions made by Herefordshire's children's services department.

Her investigation for BBC Panorama has also found:

• A young mother was wrongly suspected when her baby died from a Strep B infection, prompting her three-year-old son and the mother's teenage brother to be removed into care

• Another mother says she contemplated taking her life following a long legal battle to keep her children after she was accused of exaggerating or inventing illnesses in them

• A girl and her sister lost their chance to be adopted after the children's services department failed to follow a court order and was ultimately found to have breached the girls' right to a family life

A court hearing found social services deliberately ignored expert advice when it separated twins

Twins Brady and Grace were just three years old when they were removed from their abusive home in the county in 2014.

Despite a court-approved care plan they should be adopted together, the twins were separated and placed with different adopters.

Their adoptive parents told the BBC that Herefordshire Council had failed to fully inform them of the children's troubled backgrounds and ignored questions when their behaviour became challenging.

The only constant in the twins' lives had been each other, but the council kept them apart for more than seven months.

"Grace's early life was so broken up and so inconsistent," her adoptive mother Katherine said.

"The only thing she knows that is always there was Brady and to suddenly have that snatched away, Grace must have felt that she was never going to see Brady again."

Adoptive families say they were given no information about the children's backgrounds

The families later found out not only should the twins never have been separated, the council had altered expert advice warning of the damage it would cause.

When social workers decided to take Brady back into care, his adoptive parents fought back and ended up at the High Court in London.

There it was revealed a phrase in an expert assessment, which described the serious "sense of loss" the twins would feel if split up, had been deliberately deleted by Herefordshire children's services.

In court, Mr Justice Keehan ruled the council's behaviour was "misleading" and its failures "egregious".

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The twins continue to live apart as the judge ruled another move would not be in the children's best interests, but they are in touch and, their adopters say, are doing well.

Herefordshire Council told the BBC it wanted to "apologise to children and families affected" by its "very serious failings".

It said urgent change was a "top priority" and it had put in place a three-year plan to reduce caseloads, recruit more staff and improve leadership so "children and families get the quality of support they need".

Star Hobson and Arthur Labinjo-Hughes were known to social services before they were killed in 2020

Children's services are experiencing increased caseloads, high staff turnover and stretched resources.

There are currently 80,000 children in care in England, 13,000 more than 10 years ago.

And over the past decade, while child protection referrals have barely increased, investigations launched by social workers have risen by almost 60%.

During this period, there have been high-profile deaths where children suffered abuse that had been missed by local authorities, including the cases of Daniel Pelka and Ellie Butler.

A government report into the deaths of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson, both killed by their parents' new partners in 2020, is due to be published soon.

Herefordshire Council says it is spending an extra £22m to improve its children's services

While the basis for applying to remove a child from their home and take them into care is they have suffered, or are likely to suffer, significant harm, Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi told the House of Commons last December: "We have to make sure, if there is any evidence, any inkling, any iota of harm to any child, that the child is taken away immediately."

The Department for Education told Panorama it was taking action to improve children's services in Herefordshire.

Last month, the council announced a further £22m would be spent on improving the services.

Watch BBC Panorama's Protecting Our Children: A Balancing Act at 20:00 BST on Monday on BBC One or catch up on BBC iPlayer.