The Financial Times on 8.8.2015 published a half-page report on the collapse of the Kids Company, written by a team of writers who portrayed the matter as a meldorama focused on the personality of its founder and alleged failures in her judgement, with little detiIL explaining 19 years' of growth and performance or its risk management practices.

The Observer of 9.8.2015 published a full-page report by one of its regular writers, Henry Porter, whose daughter had worked with the charity as both a corporate fundraiser and as a mentor. His account includes both an appreciation of 19 years sterling work and some details of the structures and processes which account for its successes. Interestingly, he explicitly highlights the risks associated with the withdrawal of anticipated funding, as well as the failure of the Kids Company to recognise their legal obligation to assess and manage these RISKS effectively. He wrote: 'The allegations involve a 22 year-old male client of Kids Company who was said to have used its premises to sexually exploit girls of between 16 and 17 years old, exactly the sort of abuse that is common in the gangs of London estates. Camila Batmangheilidgh protested she had no idea of the abuse and she had not been given enough time to respond to the allegations which its has to be said were of a fairly vague nature."

As part of the success of Kids Company rested on recurrent independent reports from the London School of Economics and other prestigious third party institutions over more than 15 years, it is of some concern that Kids Company apparently lacked appropriate structures and processes of staff recruitment and training necessary to regularly conduct assessments of risks of the kinds of allegations which have now resulted in a police investigation.

A coherent statement by the Trustees of their oversight of appropriate safety and health practices is the gap in the story of the rise, good work and rapid implosion of a good place of work. Evidently, they dozed off when Ragnar Loftstedt's 2011 'Reclaiming health and safety' report gave the then-government manoeuvre to bury professional safety and health practices the red card.

The death of Kids Company challenges myths that safety and health is bureaucratic red tape that does not pay.

That may be so, nevertheless I'm intrigued to know what is the purpose of the thread. On the one hand implied is financial impropriety, risk management, child abuse and finally health and safety failures - a diverse range of topics by any standards.

You make the assumption we don't.
Some of us do it without having to blow our own trumpet.

Ray

there are two distinct issues here

1. The OSH profession, in my opinion, is not in sufficiently high public esteem that it can simply disregard opportunities to draw public attention to how it can make a difference. Encouraging representation to MPs and editors has nothing whatsoever to do with 'sucking eggs' judging by the quality of reporting on OSH interventions.

2. You apparently how not familiarised yourself sufficiently with the nature of core services of Kids Company, namely protecting vulnerable young people. In radio interviews the CEO repeatedly indicated that she had sadly failed to conduct systematic risk assessments - her habitual neglect was the proximate cause of the withdrawal of £3m. funding at the beginning of last week and the legal obligation to stop trading.

The available facts clearly indicate that the critical financial failure was actually a consequence of habitual failure to conduct necessary and sufficient risk assessments.

Simply respect the available facts of the specific organisation, which has nothing to do with railways- in an already emotially clouded scenario

You do realise that "risk assessment" is a term and a concept which is not exclusive to occupational health and safety, right?

According to one newspaper (the daily mail) the LSE is staffed by Commie drop outs; but like I say you can't take them on face value.

In a well reasoned lead editorial in today's issue, The Financial Times calls for a public explanation from the Trustees of Kids Company of the background to its cessation of operations.

While the Trustees are answerable to the Charity Commissions, the FT argues that they are also answerable to the public from whom taxpayers money was allocated.

The public statement expected of the Trustees would be strategic rather than simply tactical, which is what both the newspapers and radio reports have dwelt on up to now. And it is precisely as a STRATETIC contribution that a policy stating a competent process of management of risks o entrants, participants and staff of Kids Company services should have been in place since day 1 of the company.

Thanks toWalker and Ray for crystallising the strategic and positive nature of appropriate OSH risk assessment in this context. Hopefully the reviews by the Cabinet Office and Treasury Committee will reflect this in whatever evaluation they, as well as Trustees of Kids Company, publish before very long.

I don't know that this falls under health and safety. I know that there is a duty to protect people not in their employ under HSW of course, but with the sexual deviant who is a client it is very difficult.

You would CRB check all people working with vulnerable people of course, but what can you do about clients? You cannot CRB check everyone who walks through the door and then, where do the assessments stop?

Were they to know that a sexual deviant would be using their premises in this way? What about the bloke that walks in with a machete, or a hand gun? What about the teenager that comes in with a Pitbull or a Rottweiler that attacks someone? Where do you stop? Is this set of circumstances "reasonably foreseeable"??

In fact, does anyone have a risk assessment that cites sexual deviant exploitation on it?

I'm not saying that they did the right risk assessments or not, I don't know enough about it, but we cannot assume that even if they had cited sexual deviancy and grooming on a risk assessment that they would have been able to identify it happening.

A risk assessment is not, actually, the fix to everything that ever goes wrong in society - sometimes it just sucks and there's nothing you can do about it.

There are plenty of other fields of risk management that have nothing to do with the safety & health of people eg the reputational risk of an organisation, exposure to political risks, currency hedging, reinsurance, planning to commit a crime (and getting away with it), stock market trading.

What we do as H&S practitioners is but a small part of the overall discipline of risk management - something some of us sometimes fail to recognise when we want to effect change for what we see as good reasons but are overruled by a corporate decision.

SteveDM, not sure what your background is or what your role is now. I have worked with young people for over 20 years, prisoners for 10 and now working back in the care sector. I am employed as a safety manager and certainly do not see my role as risk assessing every individual this is what the professionally trained psycologist etc, are paid for it's like risk assessing someone saying they have a chest pain and telling them to go on light duties until it fades.

A lot of behaviours for me are learnt so service users, be it children, mentally ill, prisoners. In a prison you will risk assess what they are telling you or what the records show and the behaiour that they show, but you can't predict what is going to happen. If you can predict 1. why did you let the person watch the cartoon and 2. Hows Derek Achora and (sam).

I think your right with employees and DBS, but service users are a different kettle of fish.

Steve,

sorry didn't mean to insult, but sometimes people can take things in a different way than meant 'like coming at it from different levels' are you really a level above me?

I wasn't saying that we don't have role to play I was saying we should know are competency levels and call in someone more qualified.
I argued for years that there should be more 'joined up working' When I counselled abused kids in care (I was trained). They would come to us but with no paperwork due to confidentiality. We would then start the process sometimes from the beginning and all we were doing was keeping them in the pit of despair as they covered the same abuse suffered and therefore never really moved forward.

I do not work with the professionals you do but have a lot of experience in different care settings, I use these to my advantage, but the peple who work with them closest have the greater understanding of risk need.

I agree, I have just completed a report for the board on a number of issues I feel are letting down the place i'm at now. I got a reply saying 'god, you really mean that we have to change'. I have responded yet but thinking of 'passion' mmmmm, oh sorry, for the job I mean, we also need to ensure that the 'passion' doesn't cloud our judgements.

David's observation touches on a central facet of the fuzziness about Kids Company, makely that the core task of the charity was to safeguard and protect children and young people who voluntarily asked for help. Since counselling and psychotherapy and psychiatric treatment were core tasks it is reasonablle to expect that assessment of risks to physical and psychological safety were part of the core busines of the charity, day in day out. Yet, in her public statements in the aftermath of the unfortunate collapse, the Chief Executive repeatedly stated that nobody informed her of the critical incident of harassment that precipitated the withdrawal of £3m. from a donor prior to the collapse.

In 2011, the IOSH commissioned Nigel Heaton, CMIOSH, to design, develop and test a 2-day course precisely intended to encourage members of IOSH to move beyond the tactical assessments of discrete areas of occupational safety and health risks to develop the knowhow required to brief directors, trustees and proprietors about the strategic financial risks (including benefits) associated with technical risks. On the 2-day workshop I attended, I recall working with an architect who specialised in risks associated with steps and was eager to flesh out his appreciation of the financial and legal issues arising from his area of technical expertise. (An outline of the course is still available on Nigel's website at www.humanapps.com)

While it may well be that in an organisation producing products the financial risks associated with occupational safety and health should not be delegated to an OSH specialist, the matter is different where the 'service outcomes' are directly concerned with the work-related safety and health of clients as well as employees.

The prison is an interesting analog, yet it differs from the case of Kids Company in 2 respects. Firstly, inmates are in prison by court order rather than by personal choice (and need). Secondly, prisons are funded solely by taxpayers in accorance with laws passed by parliament; according to available information. funds for services to clients of Kids Company were formally authorised by Trustees; the public interest arises because quite a hefty sum of public money (around £37 m.) was also provided in a way in which it is not clear who is accoutable.

The IOSH and Mr. Heaton have provided a basis whereby interested members of the IOSH and of other professions may learn how to provide guidance on client safety and health that appears to have been so lacking in the operations of Kids Company and that the Trustees, auditors, leaders, managers and visiting MPs (including the Rt. Hon David Cameron and other Cabinet ministers) overlooked. Did th

Ms. Batmangeiligh appears to have acted ultra vires. To what extent did the IOSH and Mr. Heaton do likewise in offering a course that could enlarge the capability and vision of OSH practitioners?

Utter rubbish in my humble opinion, passion is not always banging on the desk until you get your own. You have to produce what needs doing and why and then you have a starting point. Passion is about how you feel about what you do and wanting to make a difference.

If the starting point is come out fighting then people directors and the like fight back.

If you work for a company where you don't have to write anything down great, but I would think monst of us have to produce something and then fight for change.

Those who wish to consider the available facts, published by those with first hand knowledge of Kids Company, can learn;

1. The CEO of Kids Company attributed her decision to stop trading to the withdrawal of £3million which a donor had agreed but stopped once the news of a police investigation about alleged sexual abuse became public.

2. She said, in two different programmes on BBC Radio 4 that nobody had informed her about the alleged sexual abuse - yet indicated that there was not a system for assessing and managing risks of sexual abuse to clients, in compliance with relevant provisions of the Management of Safety and Health at Work Regulations 1999

3. She also claimed that researchers from the London School of Economics had not identified any failing in relation to the clients. The 2013 report by them, 'Kids Company. A Diagnosis of he Organisation and its Interventions. Final Report', by Sand Jovheclovitch and Natalia Concha, London School of Economics and Political Science fails to make any direct reference to the Management of Safety and Health at Work 1999, but states on page 7, under the heading 'Challenges': Limited and unstable funding is a major source of stress and anxiety for staff and a massive challenge for the sustainability of Kids Company... An increase in bureaucracy and excessive management can jeopardise the effectiveness of Kids Company and presents a challenge to its ability to sustain absolute focus on the needs of its clients'.

On the basis of these facts, it appears that the message of Mr. Heaton and the IOSH Committee who funded the 'Business Risk Management' workshop he ran (and discussed at several branch meetings of the IOSH) is needed by organisations such as Kids Company and possibly others.

IOSH members, like the LSE researchers and apparently those who read their report when it was published, can ignore relevant facts that give them little comfort, at their peril.

I have not read all the LSE reports, except scanned the final report of 2013. These are ultimately "research reports" and in my view cannot primarily be used as the basis of information by Senior Management Team & Board of Trustees to monitor the "health" of the organisation.

Unless the reports are from "Audits" --can be internal or external, based on compliance to its own "procedures" -operational, financial, regulatory etc, it appears , despite good intentions, there appears to be gaps.

Once an organisation evolves beyond a critical size, basic Risk Management and compliance to its standards/procedures etc cannot be overlooked by those in Senior Positions and regular monitoring & feedback ( PDCA???) cannot be avoided.

Of course they're not Ray, it is quite frustrating that some posters seem to be reinforcing the media-led belief that H & S meddles in everything!

Many years ago, I worked in the care sector and would have received short shrift if I had tried to advise professionals how to manage their case load. We have to know where to draw the line and it's not about lacking passion or wanting to walk by. It's about recognising our remits and competencies.

Another thread lamented the passing of the humorous Friday thread.

Well, fear not, it has returned. This has got to be a joke, right?

See #29

Something the Turnball Report in 1999 would be good to use as a reference in risk management and what they should of followed.

Don't here much about the comparisons of the Turnball Report, risk management and how it can be referred to within out sector.

The Turnbull and Greenbury reports on Corporate Governance did not stop the banks from taking high risk profit making strategies, nor many other institutions. The FSA, formerly the FCA, stood back and watched. So, it begs the question - does Corporate Governance really exist?