THE UK Government is considering installing CCTV in all nurseries. This is in response to yet another case of serious sexual abuse of children by a childcare worker. So that’s that problem solved.
Also last week Dame Jenni Murray, who hosted BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour for more than three decades, died at the age of 75. May she rest in peace and may her family be comforted.
Murray, a dedicated feminist journalist, was one of the main women – along with former Labour MP Harriet Harman, now Baroness Harman of Peckham – who pushed the idea that women should get back to work after having a baby, preferably as soon as physically possible. Here is Murray as late as 2023 pushing this notion in the Daily Mail of all places.
Murray wanted the Government to offer 50 hours of childcare a week: ‘Fifty hours a week would just about cover the demands of a full-time job, enabling both parents to fulfil their ambitions, earn enough money to cover essentials and maybe have a bit left over for enjoying life.’
That’s putting the little one into nursery for ten hours every weekday. How glorious! We have arrived on Planet Progress at last. Enjoy!
Murray continued: ‘Did it not occur to [PM Rishi Sunak] that free childcare would enable women – and it is still primarily women who look after the kids – to go out to work, use the education for which the country has paid handsomely, pay tax and pour money back into the Treasury, while solving the country’s shortage of good, hard workers?’
That’s what we need! Not mothers looking after their children but ‘pouring money back into the Treasury’ (government borrowing reached epic heights last month so I don’t know what they are doing with all that money).
Murray and Harman are boomer feminists, the two women myself and Kathy took on almost weekly at TCW, not to much effect.
Just think of it – a two-year-old being dropped off at nursery every single day of the week for ten hours a day. Delightful! Not that this was even enough for Murray – she used to dream of 24-hour nurseries! And what, might I ask, is not to like that? Neither Murray nor Harman said much about the need for CCTV surveillance of the ‘baby rooms’ however.
The CCTV is necessary because of a recent ‘spate’ of sexual abuse cases in the UK:
1. This month Nathan Bennett, 30, was jailed for 30 years for the serial abuse of five boys at the nursery where he worked. He was described as an ‘incorrigible and dangerous paedophile’ by Judge William Hart at Bristol Crown Court. Bennett was earlier convicted of eight charges of rape, sexual assault and assault by penetration relating to five children. He previously also admitted to 13 other charges relating to four of the same children, who were two years old at the time.
2. Last month Vincent Chan, 45, admitted 56 charges including sexual assault. Jailing him for 18 years, Wood Green Crown Court Judge John Dodd told him he was guilty of an ‘utterly wicked, perverse and depraved’ campaign of sexual abuse. ‘You became a sexual predator and someone who had clearly lost all sense of moral compass,’ he said, adding Chan’s victims had been ‘too young to alert anyone as to what you were doing, they were defenceless’. Chan’s victims included four girls aged three and four whom he molested between 2022 and 2024 during nap-time at a north London nursery.
3. In November 2025 Thomas Waller, 18, was convicted at Guildford Crown Court of rape and sexual abuse of children as young as three. Waller started work at the nursery in Surrey in July 2024, having just completed qualifications. Within weeks, he had raped one boy and persuaded another three-year-old boy to engage in sexual activity while taking them to the toilet and supervising them. He was sentenced to ten years in a young offenders’ institution.
4. In September 2025, 22-year-old nursery worker Roksana Lecka was jailed for eight years for abusing 21 babies, including kicking one little boy in the face and stepping on his shoulder during a harrowing campaign of abuse. She admitted seven counts of cruelty to a person under the age of 16 and was convicted of another 14 counts by a jury at Kingston Crown Court.
5. In 2022, nine-month-old Genevieve Meehan was killed by nursery worker Kate Roughley, 37, who strapped her face-down to a beanbag at the Tiny Toes nursery in Cheadle Hulme, Greater Manchester, on May 9, 2022. Roughley admitted manslaughter and was jailed for 14 years. I wrote about that horrific case here. Lord have mercy.
6. In 2009 a Plymouth nursery worker abused children and gave images to paedophiles. Vanessa George admitted sexually assaulting children in her care, taking more than 100 images of her victims and sharing the pictures with two other paedophiles she had met on the internet. She was jailed for a minimum of seven years at Bristol Crown Court.
Figures obtained by the BBC last year showed that there were almost 20,000 reports of serious childcare incidents in England’s nurseries between 2019 and 2024. The number of legal claims involving injuries to children in nurseries has increased tenfold over the past decade. But just think of the increase in tax revenue.
I doubt that increased surveillance of nurseries will solve the problem. A change in values might.
This article appeared in Laura’s Substack on March 24, 2026, and is republished by kind permission.
