Police actions, decisions and risk assessments examined after child sustains serious injuries after safeguarding referral – Durham Constabulary, May 2025
In May 2025, Durham Constabulary received a safeguarding referral from the local authority children’s services. Concerns had been reported by the mother of a child about the father’s behaviour and ability to care for their daughter.
The Multi Agency Safeguarding Hub (MASH) within Durham Constabulary used police systems to carry out checks on the parents. They confirmed with social services that there was no information to suggest the parents were an imminent threat to their daughter.
Children’s services said that an internal investigation, with the support of housing services, was going to take place regarding the parents of the child, with their awareness and co-operation.
Five days later, the North East Ambulance Service reported that the child was in cardiac arrest at home. The child was taken to hospital and remained in intensive care, sustaining serious and life changing injuries. The child’s mother and her partner were arrested. They were later found guilty of allowing or causing a child to suffer serious physical harm. The child’s mother was sentenced to ten years in prison, and the mother's partner to 14 years in prison.
We received a death or serious injury referral from the force and decided to independently investigate the decisions, actions and risk assessments made by Durham Constabulary after receiving the report from children’s services and following contact with them.
We examined whether their decisions and actions were in line with local and national policies, procedures, guidance and training, the nature and extent of police contact with the child before they sustained serious injuries, and whether the police may have caused or contributed to those injuries.
We obtained witness statements from police staff and officers within the MASH, as well as the intelligence available about the parents. We reviewed safeguarding forms, vulnerable child reports and police incident logs.
We concluded there was no indication that a person serving with the police committed a criminal offence or behaved in a manner to justify disciplinary proceedings.
We found that Durham Constabulary officers and police staff acted in accordance with the policies and procedures in place at the time. They conducted intelligence as expected following a safeguarding referral and recorded the appropriate information on police systems.
We found that officers and staff could not have known or reasonably foreseen the risk of harm to the child from her mother and the mother's partner, who was not named in the safeguarding referral.
We carefully considered whether there were any learning opportunities arising from the investigation. We make learning recommendations to improve policing and public confidence in the police complaints system and prevent a recurrence of similar incidents.
We found that Durham Constabulary had already implemented changes to their processes which ensured updates on cases from external agencies were reviewed by a decision maker as well as an administrator. This improvement will enable the MASH to question the plans and decisions of external agencies.