Gwynedd Council Maladministration 2018.

On the 16th March, 2018, Gwynedd Council's Corporate Director and Head of Social Services, Morwena Edwards, finally responded to our Stage 2 Complaint, nearly 5 months after the completed Report was received by the Council.

The entire process has taken over 10 months to conclude - a process that according to Gwynedd's Statutory Policy should take 28 days.

Our complaint(s) were upheld by the 'Independent' Investigator and her Report - twice sanitised by the Council - still makes for some very interesting reading. But that is for another time.

The Data Breach and censoring of our personal information are currently being investigated as a separate complaint by Gwynedd's Information department. But we have now been told that the Manager is not able to deal with the issue of a senior manager, Melvin Panther, writing disparaging comments about the family to other agencies - so our complaint in this respect is still not concluded.

The official response from the Council is signed off by Morwena Edwards and she attempts to totally whitewash the highly critical Report into her department.

According to the Welsh Government Guidelines on Social Services Complaints, the Council were obliged to offer to meet with us to discuss the report and their response. They have not offered a meeting and as we have yet again been denied the opportunity to discuss the report and their response to it, we wrote in response to the Council.

We pointed out that the Children and Family department attempts to gloss over the systemic failings uncovered by the 'Independent' Investigator and still seek to blame anyone but themselves.

Social Workers and other Council Officers admit that the child's case was allowed 'to drift'.

Our reply to the Corporate Director(s) was that her response is nonsensical and farcical and disregards the failure of Social Workers and the appalling state of record keeping within the Children's department.

During this time, the Ombudsman for Wales has also been investigating Gwynedd Council.

Their Report upholds all our complaints and highlights maladministration and service failure by Gwynedd Social Services going as far back as 2010.

Yet this time Gwynedd Council have held up their hands to the Ombudman's Report and agreed to implement all the recommendations made - including certain officers being retrained in respect of the Council adhering to their Statutory Duties.

The Council would have received the Ombudsman's Report early last week. They have still not contacted us.

Something is so badly wrong within Gwynedd Council.

Censoring Of Personal Information By Cyngor Gwynedd Council.

It is the end of another week and Gwynedd Council continue to remain silent in regards to the Independent Investigator's Report into our Stage 2 complaint raised in May, last year, on the advice of the Ombudsman for Wales and so I am placing the second point of our complaint on to the blog.

It involves censoring of personal information obtained under a SAR (subject access request) and a Data breach. 

Data & Information:  The complainants have been provided with an email by Gwynedd County Council which had been partially censored. They believe that there was no legitimate reason to censor the information as there were no third party information within the email, and they believe that the censored narrative was an attempt to prevent them from reading disparaging comments about them by Mel Panther to a professional in the education department.

The complainants were also given emails which contained information shared between professionals relating to other children, which was their personal information and a clear breach of data protection and confidentiality.
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The complaint says it all really and our desired outcome was -

The complainants seek an explanation for the censoring of their own information, and whether or not it is legal to do so. They seek an explanation from Melvin panther as to how he thought it in any way appropriate or professional to speak about them in such a derogatory manner to another professional working with the family.
In relation to the information containing other children’s details, they wish for this to be dealt with via the Council’s information/Data protection security policy & procedure.

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There are at least four (4) emails that have been censored by a black marker pen.

All of the censored emails were sent by Melvin Panther, a senior manager in Gwynedd Children and Family Support department.

Now I am not suggesting that Mr Panther censored his own emails, which we were the subject of, because everyone who works in the Care sector has to sign the Data Protection Act and it will have been made very clear to them at the time that altering records or other peoples information, in any way, is a criminal offence.

But someone did indeed censor our personal information, we believe, in attempt to cover up the disparaging remarks made by Melvin Panther. So who ?
I have sighted the response by the Education department to Mr Panther and I read it as a polite slap down so my thanks to that Education officer.

Melvin Panther is a Manager of the social worker, Jamie Haydon, named in the point of complaint discussed in the previous post.

The Data breach involves sending us the name(s) of children receiving support from the council and also names the school the child attends.