A Few New Year Thoughts. My Main Hope for 2011? Fair Treatment - finally - from Wakefield Council




The Psycho Spaniels, Harley & Buster, on Wandworth Common in the snow, December 2010

It’s that time of year again, isn’t it? When we think about our hopes and dreams for the coming 12 months and make some resolutions and set ourselves some goals?

For 2011, I have one single hope: that I will finally get justice, or at the very least fair treatment, from Wakefield City Council. Or, if that is just too much to ask, maybe they could start by spelling my name correctly? After all, we have been corresponding for nearly five years now...

To cut an extremely long and tedious story short, here are the headlines:
In April 2009, five months after his undignified and unnecessarily protracted death, I was asked by Wakefield Family Services to cooperate with an investigation into their dealings with my late father, Fred. Naturally, I did so, willingly and courteously, even travelling to Yorkshire at my own expense.

In October 2009, I received a copy of the investigators’ report, which, sadly and inexplicably, contained several material errors concerning key events and more seriously, several highly defamatory references to my own probity and good name. I am an independent freelancer and my entire livelihood naturally depends upon my reputation and upon perceptions of my character.

In November 2009, on the advice of my solicitors, I sent a detailed response to the report, asking, respectfully, for the corrections and clarifications contained therein to be made to the report forthwith. The following e-mail is typical of the responses I subsequently received from Wakefield:






I was finally informed that the two retired social workers who conducted the “independent” investigation refused outright to amend the report to reflect any of our concerns, thus leaving a shockingly defamatory and materially erroneous document in the public domain.

Since then, a series of polite approaches to Wakefield, attempting to resolve matters amicably, have also failed. Wakefield Chief Executive Joanne Roney OBE (annual salary £222,172.00) refuses to meet me. Yvette Cooper, my late father’s MP and regular correspondent, has also elegantly side-stepped all attempts to attract her support for our cause.

I have now been advised that my only recourse is a bound-to-be costly legal action against Wakefield. However, my solicitors will – quite sensibly- not allow me to proceed until I have proved to them that I have amassed a fighting fund of several thousand pounds - which I should also be prepared to lose.

After all, Wakefield is a publicly funded local authority, with its own in-house legal team, all underwritten by the tax payer. I am simply a private individual; one who has been libelled and maliciously defamed in a report which was clearly designed to exonerate Wakefield Family Services from any hint of negligence or complicity in the sustained abuse of my father, a frail and only intermittently lucid, extraordinarily vulnerable old man.

Perhaps I was naïve? When Wakefield told me they were commissioning this report, I sincerely believed that they were taking a real interest in this clear instance of sad and cruel vulnerable adult abuse, that they intended to examine their approach to Dad’s case, in an effort to see whether they might amend their protocols – if only to protect future victims – and there is bound to be thousands of them – from undergoing the trials Dad endured.

With glorious 20-20 hindsight, I now see how naïve I was. The odds were stacked against me, from the start of my Dad’s ordeal in September 2006. As early as 2007, when I finally managed to arrange a face-to-face meeting with one of Dad’s key social workers and Wakefield’s Adult Protection Officer, they openly acknowledged that my intervention was considered “problematic”. That I was seen as “posh” and “Southern”.

Neither of these adjectives is particularly defamatory, I suppose, although I did take exception when an e-mail (between the “Corporate Director, Family Services” and the Customer Services Manager which was inadvertently forwarded to my in-box), described me - more or less - as “that deranged woman”. As I hope you will appreciate, I have to be a bit circumspect in what I disclose now, should I eventually be obliged to take my case to court.

To add insult to injury, a simple query for clarification on Wakefield’s Adult Protection Policy prompted the “Press & PR Manager” to contact the national newspaper for which I was writing an Elder Abuse Awareness day piece. She proceeded to roundly discredit me and my intentions. Sadly, the piece did not get published. Thus, not content with libelling me in a report which was supposed to focus on Wakefield’s interactions with my father, the Council’s employees continue to wage a sustained and underhand campaign of malicious defamation against me. As we say #Twitter: *sighs*

Perhaps I should just give up? The report itself is, by any criteria, a curious document, based entirely on the extraordinary premise that my father retained full mental capacity until his death in December 2008. He didn’t seem particularly lucid to me during his last few weeks, which he spent barely conscious in Monument House Care Unit in Pontefract, tube up both ends, being turned every four hours by the palliative team.

I am not sure either that I would say that someone who was often chased by talking fire engines and who chatted almost daily to my dead brother was entirely compos mentis? Dad’s vivid hallucinations, the distinguishing symptom of Dementia with Lewy Bodies, started in 2006, more than two years before his death and continued throughout the entire period of Wakefield Family Services’ dealings with him. The WFS report seems to think that he suffered from Lewes Bodies, which would be almost charming, if it weren’t a perfect example of the myriad careless errors of fact, syntax, orthography and punctuation which litter the investigators’ report. Clearly, nobody felt it was a significant enough document to bother to proof read?

As I write, I am awaiting the response to a series of requests I have made under the 1998 Data Protection Act and 2000 Freedom of Information Act before proceeding any further. I’ll keep you posted. Meantime, comments – and any advice – more than welcome as ever. Thanks for reading.