Useless fatso former People boss at the council, Hugh “Cares” Evans, fresh from being fired from overseeing Children’s Services after royally fucking up and getting caught spying on parents, has now been caught laughing at the disabled.
A leaked email he sent out to the SEND managers and education directors he incompetently managed reveals him openly mocking a disabled parent’s spelling.
Hugh Cares, who, for some reason, is still allowed by the Reverend to run Adult Care Services for the council, has a statutory responsibility for disabled adults in the city.
We might, therefore, reasonably expect that he doesn’t laugh at them in private. Does Hugh also liven up his dull meetings with his fawning social work managers with hilarious impressions of the learning disabled?
Can someone please put this useless twat out of our misery?
A random and incomplete selection of documents obtained under FoI shed light on what might be the point of the SEND spying affair.
Many of the documents released reveal that Education Director, Alison “Pervy” Hurley and her SEND managers were taking a lot of interest in FoI requests made by parents and in posts on social media between parents regarding legal action or judicial review.
For starters, council officers should not be interfering in the public’s use of FoI. This is laid out in FoI legislation as unlawful. Hurley and her spy team have therefore broken the law by obtaining evidence of FoI requests by parents and using them to discourage parents who were members of the Bristol Parent Carer Forum from making further requests.
On the question of legal action and judicial review, are People Director, Hugh “Cares” Evans and his Education Director Hurley running an informal demand management policy in SEND?
This is a money-saving policy used by public service managers to prevent take-up of services, often through obstruction. Council tactics may include slow and confusing processes, ignoring correspondence and communications, forcing people into long complaints processes and simply refusing people services they are entitled to.
The last thing Evans and Hurley need is parents taking legal action to obtain the services they are entitled to as this creates a double cost to the council. The cost of providing the service they’ve tried to avoid delivering and also the cost of any legal action.
Who agreed to pay our council bosses large sums to block people from asserting their legal rights to services?
Papers for Bristol City Council’s People Scrutiny Commission tomorrow which will look at council legal boss Tim O’Gara’s ludicrous ‘fact-finding’ report into SEND spying have been published. These papers include questions and statements from parents.
There’s also one statement from a councillor, Tory Geoff Gollop, which is a little bit odd. The Tory, well known for arselickin’ councillors starts off saying:
Whilst the report is extremely professional and detailed and may deliver what it was instructed to, the initial brief missed the most serious concern.
Has this Tory idiot lost all leave of his senses? Are we to understand that a report full of obvious bias, containing false statements and with a conclusion at odds with the same legal team’s opinion just two years ago classifies as “extremely professional”? What would amateur look like?
However, Gollop then goes on to say:
I am concerned that we employ people who thought it was acceptable and the fact that we have no document anywhere that makes such unacceptable behaviour an issue for potential dismissal.
That’s more like it. Almost a call to sack all the revolting fuckers responsible for spying on our city’s SEND parents. Something councillors could probably demand on the basis officers haven’t followed council policy, have almost certainly broken the law and have brought the council into disrepute.
Papers for Bristol City Council’s People Scrutiny Commission tomorrow which will look at council legal boss Tim O’Gara’s ludicrous ‘fact-finding’ report into SEND spying have been published. These papers include questions and statements from parents.
Are Bristol’s SEND technocrats conspiring against parents with SEND children? This is part of a statement from a parent to the People Scrutiny Commission on 26 September 2022.
It begins to look very much looks like SEND managers and council legal ‘investigators’ are using their shitty little internal ‘fact finding’ report to councillors to try and stitch up outspoken parents. Will they get away with it?
SENDIASS is the Special Educational Needs & Disability Information Advice & Support Service. In Bristol, this is run by Send and You. The service is funded by Bristol City Council as part of their duties in Chapter 2 of the Send Code of Practice (CoP).
On 20 January 2022, SENDIASS contacted Bristol City Council to say that an officer of Bristol Parent Carers had posted ‘confidential’ information online regarding a co-production meeting attended by the ‘Alternative Learning Provision Team and the council and other stakeholders’. Unfortunately, no such meeting actually took place involving a BPC officer*.
The event that did take place on that day was an informal coffee morning hosted by Send and You for any parent carer in Bristol to attend. I attended. Send and You often hold things like Send Surgeries, virtual coffee mornings and information events on topics such as exclusions, transitions, personal budgets and SEN support. I don’t make a habit of attending Send and You parent carer meetings. I did on this occasion because the specific subject of the meeting was for parent carers to find out more about Education Other Than At School (EOTAS). As I was in the process of taking Bristol City Council to tribunal for EOTAS in one of my children’s Education Health Care Plans, I attended the meeting.
I registered on Eventbrite as a parent carer, under my own name and with my own personal email address. Being part of the Twitter Send community, I posted some of the comments being made during the public parent carer meeting, because they might have been of interest to others. According to Bristol City Council’s report, someone from Send and You saw these quoted comments in some capacity and reported them back to Bristol City Council.
SENDIASS Staff would have known full well that this was not a co-production meeting and I was not there as part of BPC because they organised it and ran it themselves. In light of this, I went back through my Twitter account and blocked a number of Send and You staff along with some Bristol City Council and Sirona officers who had been following me.
The service appears to have conspired with the Local Authority to say that a BPC officer had released confidential information from a co-production meeting which did not actually exist. Remembering that Send and You ‘should be impartial, confidential and accessible,’ how can a supposedly vital service heavily replied upon by Bristol families now be trusted with personal information that would be highly beneficial to the council legally at Tribunal?
How on earth has false information found it’s way into a so-called ‘fact-finding report’ from Bristol City Council’s Head of Legal Services? is this good enough?
Is this report simply another vehicle for bent council managers to attack parents of SEND children with lies?
Papers for Bristol City Council’s People Scrutiny Commission tomorrow which will look at council legal boss Tim O’Gara’s ludicrous ‘fact-finding’ report into SEND spying have been published. These papers include questions and statements from parents.
Here’s a particularly disturbing statement, which suggests that the spying goes far beyond a couple of parents involved with the Bristol Parent Carer Forum. While SEND management actions go far beyond spying. They also appear to be referring ‘difficult’ parents to child protection social workers as some sort of weird disciplinary measure.
Very ugly.
I am a parent of a child with Special Educational needs. I am not an officer or volunteer of Bristol Parent Carer forum but I have experienced tweets of mine being copied and shared with other agencies.
It took me almost 2 years and cost me thousands of pounds to ensure my son was in a suitable school place – this was decided by a judge during a tribunal process, through independent reports.
During this process I was referred to social services as Bristol SEND services raised concerns that I had fabricated or induced my son’s illness. Fabricated or Induced Illness (FII) is the term used for when a parent or caregiver of someone, most commonly a child, is accused of fabricating, exaggerating or inducing the symptoms of that person.
False FII allegations are made by people in power, such as medical professionals, social workers, teachers, the Local Authority etc and they happen more often than is known and the cases are continuing to rise by the day.
Part of the reason these allegations came about is because in May 2021, an employee of BCC sent my son’s head teacher a copy of some tweets I had made about how my son feels in school. The officers told the headteacher that, “BCC communications team…. Monitor social media for us” and that she felt the school would, “rather be aware of the situation than not”.
SEND parents know that monitoring of families is prolific, especially if we appeal decisions of shoddy EHCPs which are not fit for purpose. This SEND surveillance is not just about [Bristol Parent Carer] forum officers – the leaked emails clearly show redacted names which are likely to be other parents.
Although my eldest son is now in the correct provision and social services have no concerns and are discharging us, my younger two children are being denied referrals to the Autism team. This is in part due to the school insisting that my children are not autistic and should not be referred and being denied Human Rights to go private.
The officer that shared my tweet sought to damage my relationship with the school – which they have been totally successful in and the actions of this officer now impacts the support my children are able to access and the hellish nightmare of FII accusations over the last year. The school for example, has actively called the paediatrician to ensure the GP request of referral for autism assessments is blocked.
I urgently need to get my children help as their SEN needs have been recognised by independent professionals but I am not able to get them they help they need due to the FII allegations, yet I have support of my GP, Social Services.
Their needs are being ignored across health and education. Surely this is disability discrimination? I feel this situation has been deliberately created due to the surveillance actions of the comms team and the officer that shared the post with the headteacher. I believe this is some form of punishment for advocating for my eldest and for contacting the Evening Post in 2020 to share with them how awful the SEND system is.
This is simply unacceptable and I hope my story encourages other families to share the experiences they have had and not to be scared of the threat of social services.
A new message just in regarding Bristol City Council spying on SEND parents’ social media:
“I know of one case where the comms team reported a Bristol parents tweets to the SEND team. Screen shots were taken and then a SEND manager sent the tweets to the parents school. I’ve seen the evidence.
“This family’s vulnerable and already facing accusations of fabricated or induced illness (ffi), so they dare not do anything.”
Yet again, sensitive personal data of parents, unlawfully processed by Bristol City Council External Communications Team, is casually handed over to a third party to further process unlawfully. In this case a school is involved.
We will be endeavouring to find out which school this was. Then we can arrange a visit from the Information Commissioner (ICO) for the school to explain why they think that holding parents’ sensitive personal data, obtained and shared via unlawful surveillance without permission, is OK.
What a mendacious shambles our city’s education sector is.
Yesterday, the Nazi Post and others ran with our story about the council spying on SEND parents.Naturally, Bristol City Council had a totally bizarre explanation for their actions.
An unnamed spokesperson from the council’s External Communications team – who are at the heart of the scandal after covertly collecting parents’ sensitive personal data from the internet and distributing it to Council House managers – explained:
“At the request of the Bristol Parents Carer Forum, we reviewed our own social media and passed onto the forum information relating to claims made about SEND services which included comments left by members. The forum had specifically requested this information to conduct an internal investigation into the conduct of some of its members.”
This is a bizarre excuse, which seems to be saying that a small, local voluntary group made the council do it. It also fails to address public concern that the council acted unlawfully in terms of data protection law (GDPR) and in terms of tight legislation around covert investigations by the state (RIPA).
It now appears the council statement was also a total lie. The Bristol Parent Carer Forum this morning issued the following statement:
This is a pretty categorical statement that the forum did not ask the council to collect data about parents. What have the council got to say now? What’s gonna be their next excuse for their unlawful conduct?
Our postbag has been bulging since our shocking revelation yesterday about education managers at Bristol City Council circulating wedding photos of SEND parents around the Council House and beyond
Dear Bristolian,
I went round Alison Hurley’s house once and she showed me her attic. It is indeed covered in wedding photos skewered with pins and there’s a great big purple pentagon painted on the floor. She told me that she and her partner regularly perform sex magick rituals up there.
I thought the whole thing was a bit weird to be honest but at least I know where she got all the wedding photos from now.
Many thanks for all the hard work.
Hurley: sex magick rituals in the attic?
Dear Bristolian,
I went up to Alison Hurley’s attic the other day and imagine my surprise when I discovered Bristol City Council’s Executive Director for People, Hugh Evans, chained up there in a crotchless gimp suit masturbating over a photograph of a young woman in a wedding dress! Not a pretty sight I can tell you.
Unfortunately I didn’t have a camera with me, otherwise I’d have got a photo and circulated it around work.
Maybe next time? Keep up the good work.
Evans: naked below the waist again?
Dear Bristolian,
I walked into Executive Director Hugh Evans’ office last week and he was on a Zoom meeting with Education Director Alison Hurley from her attic.
Imagine my surprise when I noticed he was completely naked below the waist and was aggressively stabbing pins into a wedding photo of a young woman that clearly wasn’t his wife!
I was so surprised I forgot to take a photo. If I had I would have circulated it among my colleagues
If you’re ever looking for some visceral screen entertainment over the next few years, we suggest you take a look at Bristol City Council’s People Scrutiny Commission on Youtube. Finally, it looks like the gloves might be coming off against the council’s social care and education bosses for failures and evasions stretching back for years.
The Commission is chaired by Tim “Little Asshat” Kent who has a child with special educational needs in Bristol and has the scars on his back to show for it. He’s joined on the committee by Christine “Miss” Townsend, who has been accused in the past of being a ‘terrorist’ by local academy chain The Venturers Trust for complaining about their admission procedures, and Hartcliffe councillor Kerry “Rosie” Bailes.
Kerry has a child with special educational needs who’s been forced out of his primary school for three years now, because, as far as we can tell, his Hartcliffe school is run by some sort of Nazi freak fully backed by the council. Also on the Committee are Tim “The Ripper” Rippington who has family experience with autism and Bristol City Council ‘services’ and Geoff “Cods” Gollop who has a family member drifting around somewhere at the wrong end of the council’s adult care service.
All-in-all it looks like the focus of this committee might be on the human rights of children and service users. Rather than its usual business of blaming parents, covering up abuse and ignoring the systematic management failures of senior bosses and an embedded culture of institutional disability discrimination. An approach that bosses, for years, have tidily wrapped up in complicated bureaucracy and unfathomable technocratic jargon to give their ugly work a veneer of respectability.
The first meeting of People Scrutiny got off to a flying start with Kerry telling Hugh “Hell” Evans, the cheery, chubby Jacqui “Village” Jensen replacement as Executive Director Of Institutional Abuse (surely Executive Director of People? Ed), in relation to his ‘Building Rights: a review of Bristol’s policies and actions for people with learning disabilities and autistic people’ report:
“This all sounds really amazing. A lot of it should already be happening. The law was changed a very long time ago and we just haven’t seen it. As public forum said, there is no accountability. You know that I’ve been in the system nearly four years now and I’ve seen no difference. It’s still very much a you’ll do as you’re told or else system and when I say or else, I mean or ,else. It is awful.”
“My son was thrown into a car park at five years old. He was locked in an office for being autistic. This report talks about abuse in care homes. That’s happening in our schools under our noses. And when we complain about it, we are lied about. There is no accountability. What kind of consequences are there if none of this happens? You know it can’t go on as it is. This is our children, you know? What consequences are there? The people who abused autistic people in care homes went to prison. You know what? When are our children going to get justice. When is there going to be some consequences?”
Evans, unsurprisingly, didn’t offer Kerry a timeline on when council bosses and education ‘leaders’ might suffer any consequences for abusing children and ignoring service user’s rights. Instead a private meeting away from the public eye was offered by Education Director Alison “Burly” Hurley.
Kerry, not one to be easily distracted by useless private meetings with desperate arse-covering council bosses keen to keep a fat salary rolling into their bank account at the expense of abused children, has instead approached the Police and Crime Commissioner requesting a criminal investigation into the abuse of SEND pupils in Bristol schools.
Last week’s meeting is available on Youtube with more set to come
