Has the Daily Mail been Gagged?

JuliaM at Ambush Predator wrote today about a story in the Daily Mail. This story was about some proposals from NICE, the National Institute for Clinical Health and Excellence, to offer Home Risk Assessments to famililes where children were deemed to be “at risk”. “Whitehall is recommending that inspectors make sure parents have fitted smoke alarms, stair gates, locks on medicine cupboards, windows and ovens, and temperature controls to stop bath water getting too hot,” said the story.

Julia provided a link to the story – but the link is broken. The Daily Mail had pulled the story. It is still there on search engine results though:

A little digging revealed the source of the story. The NICE website has details of the draft guidelines about which the Mail was writing. They can be found here.

As you might expect, the Mail story was a little overblown – but not much. The guidelines are draft guidelines at the moment, out to that process beloved of bureaucrats that pretends they are working for the people, “consultation”. They are dated April 2010.

The guidelines talk about agencies such as “Local strategic partnerships (LSPs), children and young people’s strategic partnerships (where they are not part of the LSP), local safeguarding children boards (LSCBs) and children’s trusts.” They are supposed to identify “households where children and young people aged under 15 are at greatest risk of unintentional injury.” In order to do this, they will use “surveys and needs assessments and existing datasets (such as hospital episode statistics). Or data could be gathered as part of routine practice (for example, during home visits by community practitioners).”

Factors for being “at risk” could include “overcrowding, a low income and a lack of appropriately installed safety equipment”.

Once they have identified the households, they should “offer home risk assessments to the households” and  “where appropriate, supply and install suitable, high quality home safety equipment.”

They should “ensure the assessment, supply and installation of equipment are tailored to meet the household’s specific needs and circumstances. Factors to take into account include … the household’s perception of, and degree of trust in, authority”.

You get the picture.

So the question remains. Why did the Daily Mail pull this story? Perhaps there is an innocent explanation, but I am getting a slightly queasy feeling here.