LESSONS can be learned from the tragic death of battered baby Levi Rose, says the director of public health for East Lancashire.

But a formal multi-agency inquiry already carried out did not show any serious omission or departures from procedures by any of the agencies involved, added Dr Stephen Morton.

A second review will now be conducted looking again at the way the case was handled and the recommendations of the first 30-page report in light of information disclosed at, or following, the trial of his parents convicted of his killing.

Dr Morton said: "With all these inquiries it's very rarely you don't learn anything.

"It's always possible to identify things that might have been done differently.

"But it's only in a small number of cases you can say if something different had been done at a given point it would almost certainly have produced a different outcome."

He added: "There's always things that might have been done better. A detailed review will always show that. Very few organisations or humans are 100 per cent perfect."

Dr Morton said there was a lot of contact from a wide range of agencies with the family.

"It's not that they were lost to contact or there was limited involvement," he added. Dr Morton said he was not aware of any reason to pursue disciplinary action in any of the agencies involved with the case.

Child protection work inevitably involved professional judgements, he added.

"If you were to try and avoid that and have a very prescriptive formula for making decisions you would end up with large numbers of families feeling they were being victimised.

"If you go too much the other way you end up with large numbers of children in care and families broken up, in the great majority of cases unnecessarily.

"There has to be professional judgment to allow those involved to make decisions whether in each case certain actions should be taken or not.

"There is a national recognition it's not ever possible to prevent all child abuse deaths, not without something akin to a police state.

"There is a balance to be struck between promoting good parenthood and protecting children," he added.

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