News / SEND
Independent investigation to finally take place into council ‘spying’
The Green Party chair of the children & young people policy committee says that the onus is now on Bristol’s Labour group to ensure politicians and political appointees from the previous mayoral administration cooperate with an independent inquiry into Bristol’s SEND ‘spying’ scandal.
An inquiry does not have legal powers and therefore nobody can be forced to attend.
But several councillors want the scope of the investigation to become wider than council officers and question people including – although neither were mentioned by name – former mayor Marvin Rees, now lord Rees, and his chief of staff Kevin Slocombe, now the deputy Avon & Somerset police & crime commissioner.
is needed now More than ever
A unanimous vote on Thursday evening approved an inquiry to take place into the scandal which saw social media posts by parent-carers – one of who, Kerry Bailes, is a councillor who sits on the committee – trawled by council staff, with the surveillance first coming to light in 2022.
An amendment by Bailes was voted down among concerns that widening the scope of the investigation up to the present day could be prohibitively expensive, with its costs drawn from the already stretched SEND budget.
A previous inquiry approved by full council in 2022 has never happened.
A new independent investigation is set to now be commissioned, with its exact terms of reference to be decided by members of the cross-party children & young people committee, including who to invite to take part in the proceedings.
Committee chair Christine Townsend said: “Certainly a term of reference in here needs to look at members of the previous administration alongside all the political appointees that may have worked with that administration.”
As directly elected mayor, Rees was only allowed to make one political appointment: Slocombe.
Townsend said that anybody contributing to the investigation from outside the current makeup of Bristol City Council will be doing so on a voluntary basis, “and so therefore we would be looking towards our Bristol Labour Party colleagues to ensure that those members of the previous administration and political appointees that were relevant to this; it’s going to be on you guys to get that engagement from them because if that is not forthcoming we’re not going to get as full a picture as it would be possible to get”.
Townsend added: “In some ways, it will be an incomplete jigsaw regardless because that’s now the situation that we now find ourselves in and there’s not anything that we as a committee can do about that.”
Labour councillor Kerry Bailes (right) was one parent-carer whose personal social media posts were snooped on by council staff – photo: Rob Browne
Bailes said that the reason an inquiry did not happen after 2022 “was because of legal action”.
She added: “We have waited a very long time and I think whoever was involved, (a new investigation) would give us an answer. It would give us all closure whether it was done for whatever reason.
“We need closure on this. I think everybody needs closure because otherwise, we’re just going to keep talking about this and talking about this forever and ever and ever.”
Earlier in the meeting, Hannah Woodhouse, executive director of the children & education directorate at City Hall, said that speaking about the council’s covert surveillance of parent-carers “is a really difficult conversation for many”.
The council previously carried out an internal investigation and published a subsequent ‘fact-finding report’ which found “no evidence that systematic monitoring took place”.
Main photo: Rob Browne
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