Exclusive: Minister 'angry' at failure to stop Edlington attack

"Nobody who's got the best interest of children at heart" would want the full, damning, serious case review published, he said, in a direct dig at the Tories and Liberal Democrats who insist the only way to ensure lessons are learnt is to release the document.

Speaking exclusively to the Yorkshire Post, he also defended the Government's decision to intervene in troubled Doncaster Council's children's services department in December 2008, despite his Tory counterpart last week claiming Ministers had missed warning signals at least 18 months before.

Mr Balls, a father-of-three and MP for Normanton, said he was struck by the "collapse of moral sense about right and wrong and respect for other human beings" in the Edlington case, where two brothers have been locked up for a minimum of five years for subjecting two other young boys to horrifying attacks. They pair had also targeted another young boy just a day before in a chillingly similar attack.

"No amount of reasons and excuses and explanations make it easy to understand how you could have ended up with two children doing this to other children," he said. "It is impossible to rationalise.

"When you read the detail in the serious case review – as well as what came out in court – it makes you angry that the two boys, the perpetrators and other children in the family could have experienced over such a long period of time, such a violence which they witnessed and experienced.

"Also that things could have gone wrong so many times in terms of their schooling, leading in the end to foster care, without the alarm bell having been rung about what was the reality of escalating violence."

He admitted problems at the council "over a very long period of time, we're talking back into the 1990s" – with a "lack of co-ordination, dysfunctionality in management, a failure to act on the basis of evidence" – but said it was only the Ofsted report in December 2008 that revealed the true extent of problems.

In the wake of the Edlington attacks, much of the political debate – aside from the Tories' use of the incident to illustrate their concerns over "Broken Britain" – has focused on concern that the full report revealing the mistakes made in the Edlington case will not be published.

An 11-page executive summary is in the public domain, but even the deputy children's commissioner has condemned the lack of information within it.

The Tories have pledged to publish the full document if they win the election, with identities removed where necessary, but Mr Balls dismissed that suggestion.

"Anybody writing that document for publication would not publish a full and thorough report to find out what really happened," he said. "You'd have to write it, to protect those children, in a completely different way.

"Why would I choose simply for my own motives to stand in the way of newspapers wanting to write the full details? The reason I'm doing it is because sometimes in Government you have to do the right thing, even if it's not the easy thing, and everybody says to me it is wrong to publish the full report."

Mr Balls refused to say whether he agrees the executive summary is not up to the job, but says new guidelines will mean future reports are more revealing.

"This serious case review – because it's an incident which happened in April – has been done on the old terms of reference which do have a narrower serious case review. If you ask my opinion, I think the executive summary needs to have more information and it will in future."