The rotten borough of Haringey?

AS HARINGEY council prepares to debate the Baby P affair for the first time on Monday there is a sense that the borough's elected leadership is struggling to grasp the enormity of what has happened. Baby P's death is the second such tragedy in a few years and it cannot be surprising if people wonder whether there is something dysfunctional about the place itself.

Baby P, and before him Victoria Climbie, slipped through the safety net at Haringey. Some may imagine a syndrome is at work, although the reality may be far more complex and every bit as troubling.

The story of the child tortured to death has now moved to the internet, with appeals for revenge from so-called web vigilantes. Cyberspace and mobile phones have re-opened territory once occupied by lynch mobs. Baby P's 27-year-old mother and her 32-year-old boyfriend, both convicted of causing the 17-month-old child's death, cannot be named by the media for legal reasons. Yet their names are now widely known.

As the boy's mother languished in a segregated cell at Holloway prison, awaiting sentence, pages were posted on Facebook urging violence. One carried this message: "Death is too good for (mother's name). Torture the bitch that killed Baby P." The sites were taken down, but more appeared. A text message naming the couple was sent to mobile phones across the country. A web message was directed at prison inmates, calling on them to harm the pair in jail.

The tsunami of anger and hatred unleashed by the Baby P atrocity underlines the fact that such horrors are rare. But they may become less rare in the future. Camila Batmanghelidjh, founder of Kids' Company, sees the working of London's social services departments at close hand. She told the Evening Standard there could be hundreds of children like Baby P whose plight may never be exposed because, although abused and neglected, they manage to survive.

"If that baby had not died, we would probably never have heard of him," she said. "This case is not an exception. Throughout London, and other inner cities, the whole social services system is not fit for purpose."

Ms Batmanghelidjh has seen some of the worst scenes from the frontline of childcare. And she is in daily contact with individuals who are overworked and demoralised.

"They are so overwhelmed they try to find reasons for not taking cases," she said. "Because the system is not working they realise they don't have the capability of doing the good they want to do. Every day they are exposed to relentless levels of abuse, neglect and dysfunction. They become inured; their norms shift. The futility gets to them."

There is a frighteningly high, and probably increasing, number of households where abuse is passed on from generation to generation, she said. It is impossible, in the current system, for social workers to cope.

"You can't blame them," she said. "They are forced to meet targets and to do that they often have to lie. Managers don't want to be seen to be failing, so they don't admit to failure. Central government, which might be able to make a difference, doesn't know what's happening. The individual child has no advocacy. They are suffering now but we may never know who they are."

She does not single out Haringey for blame. Its social services department is probably no worse than any other in London. Yet Haringey is different. Pauline Bradley, who worked as a social worker in Haringey for 13 years until 2006, said: "The difference from other parts of London is in the mix of rich and poor. It really is two worlds."

Haringey was formed in 1965 from the former boroughs of Tottenham, Wood Green and Hornsey. It covers 11.5 square miles and is home to 224,000 people. That is the official number. Haringey probably has a population closer to 280,000 although no one knows for sure. This is a symptom of one of its problems. The transient population in the borough is among the highest in London.

Eritreans, Tamils and Somalis are among large numbers of asylum seekers who drift in and out. Nearly half the borough's population comes from an ethnic minority background. More than 190 languages are spoken by school pupils, half of whom have English as a second language. More than a third of Haringey's schoolchildren are eligible for free meals.

The indicators for poverty suggest Haringey is the 13th most deprived area in England and the ninth most deprived in London. The most recent figures put the unemployment rate at 6.2 per cent, compared with a London rate of 3.6 per cent.

The most telling figure, perhaps, may be the one that records infant mortality. In London as a whole, the rate is 5.7 in 1,000 births. In Haringey it is 6.9.

From these numbers it might be imagined the borough is a miserable, modern incarnation of a Hogarth cartoon. Not so. In Highgate, where the boundary with Camden runs down the High Street, a seven-bedroom home with a summerhouse and wine cellar is currently on sale at £3,850,000. It is not untypical of properties in the area where expensive boutiques and highly-rated restaurants prosper in a village-like setting.

In Muswell Hill, parents clamour for a home in the catchment area of Fortismere School, reckoned to be one of the best state secondary schools in England. Houses here can cost more than £1 million, at least £200,000 more than similar homes outside the catchment area. Muswell Hill is one of north London's most sought-after locations. Actress Maureen Lipman recently sold her house here for more than £1 million and the BBCs business editor, Robert Peston, lives with his family in one of the more favoured streets.

Even here, poverty makes its presence felt. In the Baptist church on Dukes Avenue, near the patisseries and cafes of the shopping centre, volunteers run a soup kitchen five nights a week. John Grant, an early-retired civil servant, has been organising the food evenings here for 12 years.

There are contrasts like this throughout London but Haringey is perhaps unique in having such disparity over so much of its territory. At Monday's council meeting, the housing chairman John Bevan is to be asked how many of Haringey's homes have no inside lavatory. It may seem an odd request but it is being asked because on the west side of the borough, surrounded by some of the most desirable and expensive homes in London, a disabled woman in her 80s lives in a council property that has been hardly touched since the 1940s. Sixteen years ago, when she was living alone after the death of her elderly father, council officials promised they would refurbish the house and install a bathroom inside. She is still waiting.

Now, frail and moving only with great pain and difficulty, her case has been taken up by a councillor who asked to remain anonymous. The reason? The elderly woman is deeply embarrassed by her predicament and is terrified that even the faintest clue could disclose her identity.

Haringey's most impoverished area is usually reckoned to be Northumberland Park, near Tottenham Hotspur's White Hart Lane stadium. Even here, poverty is relative. Council blocks sit side-by-side with terraces of 1930s homes and many of the residents eke out an existence on benefits. One is Sarah Ellis, 33, a single parent with three children. She pays a nominal £5 a week rent for a two-bedroom flat where her 14-year-old daughter Sharmaine shares a room with her five-year-old brother Declan. The youngest child, Piper, two, shares a room with her mother.

"It's very hard," she said. "I have been begging the council to put me in a larger home for five years now. The four of us are cooped up in a small space, we need more room." This Christmas she plans to take out a £500 loan to buy the children presents. "I have often taken out a loan at Christmas so that I can afford food and presents," she said. "My weekly income is just not enough."

Each week, Miss Ellis receives £230, which includes Child Tax Credit, Child Benefit and Income Support. After spending £150 a week on groceries, the rest goes on rent and bills. "At the end of the week I have no money whatsoever," she said. "I live on less than a shoestring budget. I can barely afford nappies for my youngest."

Miss Ellis, who has lived on the estate all her life, and moved into her current flat 14 years ago, said she is desperate to leave the area because it is plagued by gangs and crime.

"I can't let the children out to play as there are gangs of kids smoking crack in the stairwell near my flat," she said. "And in the playground, teenagers think it's funny to throw fireworks and knives at one another. It's a horrible estate to live on. There are times when I wonder how the hell I can carry on."

Keith Flett, chair of Haringey Trades Council and a veteran campaigner is leading a highly vocal attempt to roll back plans for cuts in the borough's health services. Few people are better able to pinpoint Haringey's problems.

"One of the biggest issues is poverty of opportunity," he said. "Look at Tottenham. It was once a centre of manufacturing, there were jobs. Now the furniture industry has gone, the engineering firms have closed and it's all warehouses. Young people are left with nothing. Services are under pressure like never before and they struggle to get the right people. If you were a social worker would you put Haringey at the top of your list? With its history?"

Flett lays a share of the blame for Haringey's woes at the door of its Labour-controlled council. Labour has run Haringey since 1968. The leader, George Meehan, has been a councillor since 1971 and has been leader three times. He was in charge during the Climbie affair.

Flett said: "There tends to be a one-party state view of the world. You saw that the other night when Labour debated the Baby P tragedy behind closed doors. The Lib-Dems have almost as many councillors as Labour now - why didn't they invite them in? Why didn't he say: 'we're all in this together, let's find common purpose?' But the Labour leadership tends to sort things out between themselves, as they have always done."

The Lib-Dems are making inroads fast. Some perceive an East-West divide in Haringey, with the most prosperous residents in the west. This is where the party has made most progress. Lib-Dem group leader Robert Gorrie said of the disparity that is so much a part of Haringey: "It's a kind of social schizophrenia. On one side of the road you've got million-pound houses, on the other you have some of the worst council homes in Britain."

Lynne Featherstone, the Lib-Dem MP for Hornsey and Wood Green, has campaigned for action on what she says is injustice in government funding. Haringey, because of its location, is not designated an inner London borough, but it has inner city problems.

Featherstone wants the government to recognise this and has been pressing for changes in education funding. Haringey receives £5,480 for each pupil, while inner London boroughs, such as the far more wealthy Kensington and Chelsea, get £6,216.

"Haringey has equal if not greater educational challenges than many inner London boroughs," she said. "It's ridiculous that if you stand on one side of the Seven Sisters Road a child is worth £736 less than on the other because of a borough boundary."

The boundaries are mere lines on maps, of course, and Camila Batmanghelidjh says they are virtually meaningless when it comes to a question of whether a child is safer in one borough or another.

"Every social services department feels it is walking a tightrope," she said. "They have all watched the Baby P tragedy unfold and they are thinking: 'That could have been us.'"