A Government minister has expressed his “deep concerns” over a serious case review (SCR) into the death of a four-year-old boy who was starved by his mother in Bradford, saying it has failed to fully explain “missed opportunities to protect children in the house”.

Children’s minister Edward Timpson was responding to the publication of the SCR into the case of Hamzah Khan, whose decomposed body was found in a cot in his Bradford home in 2011, almost two years after he died.

Mother-of-eight Amanda Hutton, 43, was jailed for 15 years last month after she was found guilty of Hamzah’s manslaughter and neglecting five of her other children.

At her trial it emerged how a range of agencies had contact with her family but no-one spotted the danger the children were in.

The SCR into that contact concluded that Hamzah was “invisible for almost a lifetime”. The minister wrote to Professor Nick Frost, who chairs the Bradford Safeguarding Children Board, saying: “I have deep concerns over the Hamzah Khan serious case review. In particular, I am concerned that it fails to explain sufficiently clearly the actions taken, or not taken by children’s social care when problems in the Khan family were brought to their attention on a number of occasions.”

Mr Timpson set out a series of question he believed needed answering relating to the contact different agencies had with Hutton and her family.

He said: “All of these were missed opportunities to protect the children in the house.

It is tragic beyond words that by the time a health visitor did trigger concerns about the whereabouts of the younger children in the household, who were missing from health and education services altogether, Hamzah Khan was already dead.”

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