Birmingham City Council Hired Ex Rotherham Council Director To Oversee Child Safeguarding ( UK )

Breitbart News Network ^ | 7 Mar 2015 | A.B. Sanderson

[george76]

Birmingham City Council has made the astonishing decision to recruit the former director of safeguarding children and families from scandal hit Rotherham council, where he was linked to the closure of a group rescuing sexually exploited young girls.

Howard Woolfenden works for the authority as an £85,000 a year assistant director and leads the council’s work to protect young people from grooming gangs, the Birmingham Mail exposed.

His job, many times the average salary of Birmingham council tax payers, is despite his inclusion in the Rotherham Council management team which were heavily criticised for failing victims of CSE and for closing down the welfare group Risky Business, described as ‘the only lifeline’ for abused girls in the town.

The outreach group offered help and advice to the victims of the mass grooming and abuse which was going on in Rotherham, mainly by Asian Pakistani men, and collected details of the abusers on a confidential database.

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Child abuse and exploitation happens all over the country, but Rotherham is different in that it (the council) was repeatedly told by its own youth service what was happening and it chose, not only to not act, but to close that service down. This is important because it points to how it has dealt with uncomfortable truths put before it

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Controversially, the database with details of the offenders, which showed they were almost all Pakistani men, was taken into the possession of Council officials. The database has subsequently gone missing from the authority.

UKIP PPC for Rotherham, Jane Collins, condemned the decision by Birmingham to employ Mr Woolfenden and said the councillor needed to look into the Casey report and investigate his actions whilst he worked at the council.