Why everyone should be talking about Tash Ashby
Tash Ashby was 21 years old when she died. At the time of her death, she was street homeless, living in the undergrowth around Hereford bus station. Her lifeless body was found in her tent.
Tash Ashby was taken away from her birth parents in 2011. Both her birth parents were at her inquest, along with her sister. Their pain was evident.
When she was removed from her parents, Herefordshire Council assumed legal responsibility for her well-being. Specifically, the elected Councillors of Herefordshire became her collective corporate parents. This is a legal term with legal responsibilities attached. She had 53 corporate parents. Not one of them was at the inquest. There were no officers from Herefordshire Council present either.
Tash is dead, and in response the state is investing a huge amount of resource to try to establish how and why she died. Multiple state actors are involved.
Pathologists have undertaken a post-mortem which concluded Tash died from heroin toxicity.
The police investigation is ongoing, to work out who administered the lethal dose of heroin. It appears that Tash was not a regular heroin user.
The coroner held a first hearing on 4th November 2024. This was adjourned so that the scope of the inquest can be broadened to establish not just how Tash died but why she died homeless in a tent, living among drug takers, when she was a care leaver and a vulnerable young adult thought to have a mental age of an eight year old.
It needs repeating. Tash was a 21-year-old care leaver without capacity living on the street with Class A drug users.
The state has laws and safeguarding protocols in place which mean that Tash should not have been living in that tent.
At the hearing on 4th November, a safeguarding referral from a third sector organisation working with Tash was read out by the family’s legal representative. It set out in some detail how Tash lacked capacity to make important decisions, the impact that this was having on her ability to manage her own life and how urgent intervention was needed to avoid a premature death. The safeguarding referral was made just 6 weeks before Tash died.
Just four days before she died there was another safeguarding referral, this time from Hereford County Hospital.
The coroner had little hesitation in broadening the scope of the inquest to include these questions:
- Why was Tash street homeless?
- What was Herefordshire Council doing to safeguard her?
- Is her death part of a pattern of systemic failure at Herefordshire Council?
These are appropriate questions in the circumstances and it is a relief to know that we live in state which does investigate the premature death of an extremely vulnerable adult. But it’s no help to Tash.
What Tash needed was a system of accountability which meant that the local authority’s handling of her case could have been robustly and effectively challenged while she was still alive.
In so many of the high-profile child deaths, we read that the alarm was raised, usually multiple times and the responsible authorities failed to take meaningful action to protect a child from their carers.
The trouble for Tash is that when a child is already in care and is being failed by their corporate parents, anyone raising the alarm has to raise the alarm with the corporate parent. A failing corporate parent marks its own homework. There is no independent regulator of Local Authorities’ Children’s Services. That needs repeating too. There is no independent regulator of Children’s Services (see below). Which means, in Tash’s case, that those raising the alarm were raising the alarm with a children’s social care department already labelled by Ofsted as Inadequate across all areas.
When you believe a local authority is failing a child in a case as serious as this, what can you do?
- Initially, you can write to the local authority and raise your concerns. The organisation marks its own homework.
- You can try and escalate matters to the Local Government Ombudsman, but anyone familiar with this process would know that this would be ineffective (at best). The LGO is chronically underfunded and has set very strict criteria for who can complain and what can be complained about. A concerned third party would not have been allowed to complain on Tash’s behalf without her consent, even though she lacked capacity. The waiting time for a complaint to the LGO to be triaged is weeks, and if it goes to investigation, it is months before any finding is made – and of course, where vulnerable children and adults are concerned time is critical.
- If you feel that a social worker has committed professional misconduct, you can complain to Social Work England. You can’t complain simply because you think their decision is irrational and not in the child’s best interest. Again, there are very strict rules about who can complain and about what, and the submission process is not for the faint-hearted. Complaints to SWE, even if accepted, often take years.
- Most people assume that Ofsted would investigate a serious safeguarding concern raised directly with them, particularly if it relates to a Local Authority which they have described as inadequate and where their latest inspection report starts with these words: Children and young people in Herefordshire are not protected from harm. But Ofsted do not accept responsibility for investigating safeguarding concerns: it responds to such requests by stating that it is not a regulator and does not investigate individual cases.
- Next you might turn to your MP. Jesse Norman is MP for Hereford and South Herefordshire. In a public meeting last summer called to discuss the crisis in Herefordshire Children’s Services, the MP bemoaned “a colossal failure in accountability” and said: “The hiding and bureaucratic tricks are unacceptable.”
Currently there is no mechanism for an MP to stop unacceptable practices which harm his or her constituents repeatedly.
There appears to be no effective way for parents or third parties to challenge a Council’s failure to keep a child in its care safe. This is catastrophic in an era in which the state has encouraged social workers to be suspicious of all parents. In the wake of the truly shocking, child protection failure which led to the death of 5-year-old Arthur-Labinjo-Hughes at the hands of his dad and partner, Nadhim Zahawi, the then Minister for Children, said this in parliament:
“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.”
He meant that a child will be taken away from birth parents. Not from corporate parents who are failing.
The state has immense powers to remove children from their birth parents, and the numbers of children in care have doubled in the last 12 years. But corporate parents can operate almost with impunity. In effect, a child removed into the care of a failing local authority has fewer protections than a child left with parents who are failing them.
When Tash’s inquest is concluded there will, no doubt, be a statement issued by Herefordshire Council saying that lessons have already been learnt and a new system has been put in place. The trouble is that the people of Herefordshire have heard this before.
Just five weeks before her death, the Herefordshire Coroner issued a Regulation 28 notice to Herefordshire Council over the death of Sam Taylor. Sam was also a vulnerable young care leaver who died while street homeless in Hereford. A Regulation 28 notice is a serious matter that registers the coroner’s concern that action or inaction by a state body has contributed to a death.
This is what the Regulation 28 notice said:
CORONER’S CONCERNS
During the course of the inquest the evidence revealed matters giving rise to concern. In my opinion there is a risk that future deaths will occur unless action is taken. In the circumstances it is my statutory duty to report to you .
The MATTERS OF CONCERN are as follows.
(1) A prevention duty was owed to the deceased and due to Herefordshire Council communication process failure, contact was not made with him or those with whom he had approved contact prior to his death.
(2) Evidence suggests that in reality Mr Taylor would have met the threshold for vulnerability set out in the Housing Act 1996 but the failure to progress the application resulted in this never being established.
(3) A system for identifying process failure should be in place and effective.
A year before that Regulation 28 notice was issued, Professor Preston-Shoot chaired a “thematic review” into six premature deaths of vulnerable adults living homeless in Herefordshire. There were twelve recommendations. It has been suggested that two years on none of the recommendations have been implemented. If this is the case, it is a shocking indictment of the current ‘service’.
The lesson that is being learnt time and time again by the people of Herefordshire is that they are powerless to do anything about the crisis in their children and young adult safeguarding services.
The alarm has been raised in so many ways, including by a High Court Judge, Judge Keehan who went public with this most damning of indictments:
In the whole of my professional life I have rarely encountered such egregious and longstanding failures of a local authority
An earlier posting (Herefordshire children’s services – a public inquiry: if not here, then where?) listed this and other damning judgments, as well as a BBC Panorama expose, the devasting findings of an Independent Commission, the highly disturbing report by two former Councillors, the level of legal damages paid by the Council and so on. These are not merely historic injustices done to families: families still waiting for some form of ‘accountability’. There is significant evidence to suggest that these appalling practices are continuing. Last month (4 December 2024) the BBC reported that that the Herefordshire’s Children’s Services were still ‘struggling to address long-standing problems’.
On the 18th December 2024, the Information Commissioner’s Office ruled that the Council had to disclose information concerning the rate of Fabricated or Induced Illness (FII) allegations that had been made against Herefordshire families (it has been alleged that disproportionate numbers of parents have experienced such allegations). The Council had promised to provide this information by 18 November 2022, but then altered its position and refused disclosure, for reasons that the Information Commissioner found unconvincing.
Earlier this week the BBC reported that an external member of the council’s children and young people scrutiny committee had resigned stating, among other things, that:
- He was “horrified” by families concerns;
- The committee had been “in the dark” over issues such as a serious case review;
- “The things I’m particularly concerned about are the individual cases around families and children where children have been removed from families, and the experience of those families and the decision-making processes … it’s a huge decision to decide that a child can no longer remain with the family, and that decision should only be made when we’ve absolutely met all of the thresholds”;
- “You are told, ‘it’s all being taken care of’, but nothing changes“.
Over two years ago the Government intervened in an attempt to bring about a fundamental change in the way Herefordshire’s Children’s Services behaved. Two years on and millions of pounds later, that intervention has failed to materially shift the dial and there are still egregious failings unfolding in plain sight for anyone willing to see them.
If the new Government cares about preventing harm to children in and out of care, then it must look carefully at how and why Tash Ashby died: the Government must treat the risk to children and young adults from failing corporate parents with as much zeal as it treats the risk to children from birth parents.
The current system of children’s social care is chronically failing children, and the Government must act swiftly and decisively in Herefordshire and beyond to prevent future deaths.
Posted 10 January 2025