After her social services career was blighted by fallout from a high-profile child protection scandal, Valerie Howarth nevertheless went on to become a leading authority on children’s welfare and one of the first “people’s peers” created by Tony Blair.
As the first chief executive of Childline, Howarth led the confidential counselling service for children and young people through its early years of explosive growth. Through her further work with numerous charities and care regulators, and her active crossbench role in the House of Lords, she made an enduring impact on policy and practice.
Howarth, who has died of cancer aged 84, was director of social services for Brent, north London, at the time of the killing of a four-year-old girl, Jasmine Beckford, by her stepfather. Jasmine had been in care but had been returned to the family. An independent inquiry in 1985 exonerated Howarth, and deemed her a “high quality” director, but she parted company with Brent after the inquiry report, and the offer of a more senior job at Cambridgeshire was withdrawn.
The TV presenter Dame Esther Rantzen, who set up Childline, was then seeking a chief executive for the new charity, and her sister, a social worker, recommended Howarth, under whom she had trained at Lambeth in south London. Howarth took up the role in 1987, after a 12-month interlude taking management courses, and remained there until appointed one of the first 15 people’s peers in 2001, with the title Lady Howarth of Breckland.
When the then leader of Brent’s opposition Conservative group criticised her peerage, claiming her time at the council had been characterised by a “culture of political correctness”, Rantzen demanded he apologise for his “shabby attack on an outstanding woman”.
Howarth played a key role in professionalising Childline, which had been overwhelmed by telephone calls from 50,000 children on its first night in 1986. Today it offers counselling by phone and email, and one-to-one sessions at 12 centres around the UK. It became part of the child protection charity NSPCC in 2006.
Howarth was born in Sheffield, the elder daughter of George Howarth, a steelworker, and Edith (nee Steele), who took a succession of jobs to supplement her husband’s wage. Valerie and her sister, Yvonne, both passed the 11-plus to Abbeydale girls’ grammar school and Valerie went on to Leicester University, where she obtained a diploma in social studies in 1962 and a certificate in applied social studies in 1963. She went on to gain a certificate in childcare at the then North London Polytechnic (now the University of North London) in 1968.
From 1963 to 1968, Howarth worked in Leicester as a caseworker for the Family Welfare Association charity (now Family Action). It was in Leicester that she met Barbara Lees, also a social worker, who was to become her partner. Howarth actively supported the 2004 civil partnerships legislation in its passage through parliament, and it enabled her and Lees to formalise their relationship in law in 2008.
Moving into statutory social services in Lambeth in 1968, as a senior childcare worker and training officer, Howarth worked her way up the borough’s structure to assistant director level before leaving for the Brent directorship in 1982.
Among the many charities she worked with, some of her longer associations were with John Grooms, a disability charity, where she was a trustee from 1987 to 2018, and chair for three years after it merged with the Shaftesbury Society in 2007 to become Grooms-Shaftesbury (later Livability and now Shaftesbury); and the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, which works to prevent child sexual abuse, where she was a trustee from 1992 to 2018, and patron thereafter.
She was a board member of regulatory bodies including the Food Standards Agency (2000-07) and the former National Care Standards Commission (2001-04) and served on the board of Cafcass, the family courts advisory service, from 2004 to 2012, taking the chair for the last four years of that period to help lead its recovery from a period of poor performance and internal conflict.
In that, as in all her management and non-executive roles, Howarth was known for her calm, can-do style. Her Christian faith meant a great deal to her and she was a regular churchgoer in Norfolk, where she and Lees had a house in Mundford and where Howarth chaired the safeguarding committee of the Norwich diocese from 2016 to 2018. In a Lords debate, she once described herself as a “rather unusual” member of the Church of England.
She and Lees, who died in 2021, shared a great love of the Norfolk countryside and of dogs. At one point they had six.
Howarth, who was made OBE in 1999, had lived with cancers since 2017. She is survived by her sister, her niece, Liz, and her nephew, Andrew.
• Valerie Georgina Howarth, Lady Howarth of Breckland, social worker, born 5 September 1940; died 23 March 2025
