You will remember the lengthy and ultimately fruitless correspondence I have conducted with you and your officers over failures to protect children in a number of settings in Local Authorities in both North and South Wales. The suspension of Charles Faber by Cardiff for finally resorting to public whistleblowing over the failures to protect children in the city reaffirms our concerns; we have recently received information from other staff in Cardiff that last year over 250 child protection cases were unallocated. We also know that some opposition politicians are pressing for a public inquiry on the situation.

                What our previous correspondence with you, other Assembly and Westminster Ministers and MPs has made clear, is that if a Local Authority is determined to conceal its own failures and malpractices from the top, you see little option but recourse back to that Authority and its Monitoring Officer- where the Monitoring Officer is likely to be the same Chief Officer of Legal Services who advises that the whistleblower be disciplined, rather than the malpractising officer. We know from Cardiff and other Welsh Authorities that the powers of suspension have been frequently imposed on the more junior worker trying to raise concerns in good faith, but not against the more senior person causing the concern. Indeed, following correspondence with you and your officers on an earlier case, the staff member felt sufficiently intimidated to go off sick and withdraw her detailed and corroborated evidence of failures to properly investigate malpractice.

                The Assembly's own Report on the Framework for the Assessment of Children in Need declares, "The Assembly believes that Local Authorities Corporately have responsibility to address the needs of…disadvantaged children…" When we last quoted that in correspondence to you, we ended our letter, "The Assembly has the opportunity…to set a decisive "line in the sand" for other Welsh Authorities- this is what we are going to do, these are the heads that are going to roll- and these are the consequences for others if they go down that same road. The alternative is implicit or explicit collusion." Well, Cardiff is going down that same road, but it is whistleblowers heads that are rolling in the sand, rather than lines being drawn and the Assembly will be marked down again for implicit or explicit collusion- if it does not intervene.

                More recently, you wrote to me that the modernisation agenda for local government would be the way that the Assembly would express its commitment to "promoting the highest standards of conduct in local government in Wales". We say that would be a procedural route to solving the problem of council malpractice, by setting up Standards Committees and Codes of Conduct, but that does not answer the evidence we have of bad councils in Wales riding roughshod over their own procedures in order to silence ethical staff, never mind the procedures imposed on them externally by the Assembly.

                The councils we have brought to the notice of you and other Ministers happen to have been Labour run. We warned previously of the appearance of "collusion, perhaps based on cynical political loyalty, rather than what is best for the citizens…" We warned in the case of one council where "even the Area Child Protection Committee becomes hostage to keeping the good mane of the Administration- then what chance has a child's voice have of being heard, when what they have to say becomes a political embarrassment?" That question hangs in the air for you in how you manage Cardiff, for if we cannot guarantee the proper management of child protection in the capital, where else can we in Wales?

Yours Faithfully,

Chris Clode, Network Coordinator, Freedom to Care.               

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FTC 5th Oct 2001