It was easy to miss: minister for children Margaret Hodge this month delivered the results of the mighty national search of files of children made the subject of a care order that she commissioned in the summer. This was in the wake of the Angela Cannings appeal, in which the judges proposed that there should be no prosecution in infant death cases that depended on disputed medical evidence.
We were warned of a national scandal: hundreds of miscarriages of justice.
The triumphalism was palpable. Campaigners for accused adults had panicked the minister - who was always flaky on child protection - into ordering a trawl of records. So, 28,867 children's files were surveyed. The result? Five raised doubts as a result of disputed medical evidence. Only one is now being reconsidered by the court.
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