A LITTLE more than a year ago Thames Valley Police and Oxfordshire County Council prostrated themselves in public over the failings that helped the Bullfinch gang of paedophiles to prey upon and abuse vulnerable young girls.

Lessons had been learned, we were promised. Changes would be made.

The indifference shown by police and social services to the young victims was exposed by the lengthy Bullfinch investigation and would not happen again, was the pledge.

Yet today we can reveal how, at the very point when police and social services were readying themselves to swoop on the Bullfinch gang and would have been well aware of their own unforgiveable negligence, another girl’s revelation that she was being abused by an adult in an unconnected case was to all intents and purposes ignored.

The police and the council’s safeguarding team were told of her complaint from January 2012, says Judge Gordon Risius, and their inaction contributed to her being abused again in horrific fashion months later.

Yesterday we asked both police and the county council if they could explain to the public how it could possibly be that at the height of the Bullfinch investigation, when their sensitivity to allegations of this nature should have been at its highest, another girl was failed.

The response was a terse refusal to comment. No reassurance there then.

To be fair, Chief Constable Sara Thornton did issue a statement admitting that their handling of the case was “completely unacceptable” and the matter is now being investigated.

But this latest case reignites the concerns about how many other young people were abused and then treated in this way by our slumbering authorities before they finally woke up to it.

Last May, when the Bullfinch verdicts were returned, we wrote: “....Thames Valley Police, Oxfordshire County Council’s social services and our politicians owe us apologies, reassurances and proof they will not make the same mistakes again. If they do, heads must roll at the very top. They’ve been given a second chance. They do not deserve a third.”

We await for the Bullfinch serious case review into the police and social services with even more interest.

When it finally does appear, ‘No Comment’ from the agencies charged with protecting our children from sexual exploitation will not cut the mustard.