Obit in the Times of 9 April 2025:
E X T R A C T
Baroness Howarth of Breckland obituary: Childline chief executive
Softly spoken social services director who steered the helpline through its early days and led calls for a royal commission on child sexual abuse
...Valerie Georgina Howarth was born in Sheffield in 1940, the daughter of George Howarth, a steelworker, and his wife Florence (née Steele). “It was a tough background,” she recalled. “I had friends who were abused in one way or another. That’s one of the reasons why I’m not actually shocked by abuse.” She was educated at Abbeydale Girls’ Grammar School, Sheffield, and trained as a social worker at the University of Leicester before spending five years working with abusing and violent families at the Family Welfare Association.
In 1968 she joined Lambeth council as part of a team dealing with difficult, disorganised and often violent families. “I was a family caseworker, making sure that whatever happened, families should stay together,” she said. “And I am not very conventional about what I consider a family is. It’s whatever unit works.” One of her trainees was Tessa Jowell (obituary, May 14, 2018), the future culture minister, and she later wrote of “watching our star pupil with pride and joy”...
...She was unmarried and had no children, though in the mid-1980s she shared a house with three other people that was always full of children and her younger sister’s family were frequent visitors.
Howarth retired from Childline in 2001, the same year that she was nominated to be one of Tony Blair’s “people’s peers”. She sat as a crossbencher and was both secretary of the all-party parliamentary group for children and a member of the all-party parliamentary group on ageing and older people. A campaigner to the end, she championed housing for the elderly, saying in 2022: “We need as much attention paid to the last-time buyer as the first-time buyer.”
More than a decade after Howarth left Childline, Rantzen described how valuable she had been to the charity. “Childline survived, grew and prospered under her leadership. She created a team and steered them as they formulated our volunteer training programme,” the presenter wrote in The Daily Telegraph. “Childline owes her an enormous debt. Her commitment to children shone through every decision she made. And it still does.”
Baroness Howarth of Breckland OBE, chief executive of Childline, 1987-2001, was born on September 5, 1940. She died from cancer on March 23, 2025, aged 84