What's 'Harrowing', Graham, Is That You Are Blaming The Wrong People...

A two-year-old girl who drowned in a bin containing 9cm of water in a back garden in east London was a victim of “gross failures” largely by social workers, a coroner has concluded at an inquest.

Really? Let's look at the facts, shall we?

At the time of her death, Mazeedat Adeoye was being cared for in Dagenham by an acquaintance of her mother, Balikis Adeoye, who had to stay in hospital with Mazeedat’s baby brother when he required urgent heart surgery.

Adeoye had asked social workers at Newham council if they could provide foster care for her daughter for 10 days during the hospital stay. She had come to the UK on a visitor visa with Mazeedat in spring 2021 to join her partner but the relationship ended in May that year and she overstayed her visa, which expired in September 2021, because she had no means to return home. She was not eligible for state support, a status referred to as “no recourse to public funds” (NRPF).

Yet she was soaking up public funds with the baby's hospital stay, wasn't she? And wanted more, of course. Thankfully, the social workers - for once - weren't having any.  

The NRPF team at the council declined to provide foster care and told Adeoye to look for someone “in her community” who could look after her daughter. A woman from a local mosque agreed to take care of the child until Adeoye and her son left the hospital.

The senior coroner for east London, Graeme Irvine, found that while playing alone and inadequately supervised in the woman’s back garden, Mazeedat fell head first into a plastic refuse bin that contained water. Despite the water’s depth being no more than 9cm, Mazeedat drowned. Irvine described the case as “particularly harrowing”.

Well, I sort of agree. If she'd been deported the moment she overstayed her visa, we wouldn't be here right now, wasting yet more taxpayer cash on this inquest. And castigating social worker who, for once, did their job.  

This is the first death of a child thought to be linked to NRPF. In his conclusion, Irvine said: “There was a missed opportunity to provide effective care in the form of an offer of a temporary fostering placement which would have probably resulted in the avoidance of Mazeedat’s death … Local authority children’s services failed to support Mazeedat.” He said some of the social workers who failed to support the family were “obdurate and stubborn”. “Balikis Adeoye was treated in a dehumanising way on account of her status in the UK,” the coroner said.

We had no obligation to spend more money on her. We were already spending enough!  

Juliet Spender, a human rights lawyer at Irwin Mitchell, representing Adeoye, said: “There were several opportunities to ensure an appropriate foster placement was put in place for Mazeedat. Sadly, we believe, these opportunities were missed with devastating consequences. It’s now vital that lessons are learned from this tragedy to protect children in the future.”

Might I suggest 'immediately deporting visa overstayers' in future Juliet? Or would that impact on that hose of taxpayer cash pumping into your chambers in legal aid?