Archive for the ‘Articles’ Category

7th November 2011

Saturday was my 50th birthday.  This year was a bit different to other years as we helped with the church outreach.  The morning started with prayer then coffee.  Rick had bought me a chocolate birthday cake so we all had a piece of that as well.  Once a month volunteers clean up two streets so we split up into two groups.  I actually enjoyed it even though it was hard work at times.  One of the residents brought us out a coffee each and chocolate.  We had a good morning though.  Lunchtime was spent at J-P and N’s home and had barbequed sausages in rolls which went down well.

The afternoon was spent relaxing and we had an Indian meal at home.  As usual we couldn’t go out due to the fireworks.  Bruno hid and I had to suffer Chyna on my lap being a pain.  She is so heavy and shakes so I got a bit annoyed in the end.

I spoke to my Dad yesterday.  It was good to catch up on news although my sister is suffering with her health.  I was going to wait until her birthday before writing but this gave me the opportunity to write.  This is what I wrote:

Dear Caroline,

I spoke to Dad yesterday and he told me about your gall stones and that you will be having a scan.   I told him I would drop you a line so you would know I am thinking of you.  Dad also mentioned that Brian is insulin dependent now.  Obviously I asked after the girls and he told me that Katie’s had James and that you look after Isabelle on Tuesdays.  Dad also mentioned that Katie has mastitis (sp?) so I hope she is better soon.

Our health has also been up and down as well.  Rick has arthritis in his back and trapped nerves in his spine.   He has also been diagnosed with diabetes a few months ago.  Rick had put on quite a bit of weight on over a few months despite getting plenty of exercise.  Our doctor suggested gastric surgery and we went to an information evening.  Rick had to have blood tests done and that’s how we found out.  His blood sugar levels went up to 30 at its worst and had to be in hospital overnight.  The diabetes is controlled with medication now although now Rick is having problems with his skin on his left arm.  Rick has an infection in his arm and one of his fingers so I having to put cream on for him.  He is also taking antibiotics.

I now have curvature of the spine and arthritis in my back as well as my hands now.  I am taking NSAID medication and a strong painkiller that is used for depression as well as for pain relief.  For almost three years I have been taking two types of medication for high blood pressure and one for high cholesterol.  My blood pressure went up to 210/60 which was dangerously high and took several months to come down.  I am now permanently on an anti depressant due to severe depression.  I have suffered with it for many years but refused to take anything as I couldn’t admit to myself how bad my depression was.  In 2005 I couldn’t take feeling so low so did see my doctor.  This was after years of self harming as it was the only way I knew how to let emotional pain out.  I had also been suicidal over the years.  This included being hospitalised overnight in 1998 so my heart could be monitored.  In 2005 I did tell Mum and Dad I was suffering with depression but they never knew how bad it was.  Dad still doesn’t know how bad it is so please don’t tell him.

We are very happy living up north.  A few years ago we lived in Hartlepool near where Poppa grew up and where our great grandfather was also born.  We moved back for a few years but missed it so much that we came back.

For years now we have been attending Pentecostal churches.  In November 2005 I was baptised by full immersion, Rick was baptised back in 1989.  We are members of our local church where we are very involved which includes keeping the website up to date.

Take care of yourself, love to everybody and I hope all goes well with the scan.

With love

Philippa

1st November 2011

Last Wednesday we watched a dvd at the homegroup.  It was about healing and there was a bit about the underground church in Chjna.  I found it difficult to get comfortable so decided to sit on the floor.  The dvd was so good that I was engrossed so didn’t move much.  When I did I didn’t feel any pain in my back but didn’t think about it.  When the dvd finished I had a few offers to help me up which I refused and I realized the pain had completely gone from my back.  It’s been fine since so I feel much better in myself.  J-P asked me to testify on Sunday which I did at the beginning of the service.  It was a bit scary as I am shy but I was happy and I’m glad I did as I am getting more confident.

Last night was the ladies group at N’s and we had great fun.  N had prepared questions so we took it in turns answering them.  It certainly gave us plenty to talk about.  It’s only the second one but I am enjoying the evenings out as it’s been a long time since I’ve had nights out like these.

24th May 2011

Today we finally got carpets laid in the lounge, kitchen and bathroom.  The only room that needs doing now is the spare bedroom.  Our neighbour who has become a good friend and her ex sister in law helped as so that made life easier.

I feel a bit guilty as we didn’t take our neighbour’s dogs out for a walk. We have got into taking them out once a day.  It is a pleasure walking them as they are small so it doesn’t bother us that they pull.

We have seen our doctor as he has the results back for Rick’s MRI scan.  He has mild arthritis in his back although it is moderate in a couple of discs.  Rick also has trapped nerves which can be operated on.  A referral has been done so now we have to be patient.  He hasn’t made up his mind yet whether to have surgery and will decide when he’s sees the surgeon.

13th May 2011

Our day out at Whitley Bay was good.  It wasn’t quite what I was expecting and the afternoon session was better than the morning.  There was a soprano singer there called Ruth Betteridge who has an incredible voice.  My mum would have loved listening to her.  Three songs stick in my mind; My God from Sister Act, a love song from The Marriage of Figaro and As Long As He Needs Me from Oliver.  My mum enjoyed watching musicals and she loved opera.  I remember watching Oliver with her and As Long As He Needs Me being one of her favourites from the film.  It was one of those moments I wish my mum could have been there.

Rick had his MRI scan done on Wednesday and was told to contact our doctor in two weeks time.  I was surprised that Rick didn’t freak out at having to lie in an enclosed for 20 minutes.  He does suffer a bit with claustrophobia.  Rick’s arms were achy afterwards as he had to keep them above his head.

Apart from that it has been a quiet week.  Yesterday was a bad day for me.  All I can put it down to is the amount of stress we have been under lately.  It doesn’t help that I have bad back pain again and am suffering with discomfort with my right foot.  The pain isn’t there all the time but I am suffering more often.  I shall see how the next few days go although I am seriously thinking about making an appointment with the doctor.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1325311/Gay-rights-laws-danger-freedoms-Bishops-speak-homosexuality.html

Christian couple barred from fostering children because of their views on homosexuality go to court

By Sam Greenhil

Last updated at 9:26 AM on 1st November 2010

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1328434/Baby-P-scandal-Child-protection-body-fit-purpose.html

Child protection body which failed to cope with aftermath of Baby P scandal ‘not fit for purpose’

By Steve Doughty
Last updated at 7:43 AM on 11th November 2010

The organisation of social workers that is supposed to stand up for the most troubled children has instead brought chaos to the family courts, MPs said yesterday.

Its staff do not do their jobs, its managers are weak and it has failed to cope with the crisis that swept the state child protection system after the Baby P scandal, they added.

A report from the Public Accounts Committee watchdog said the £131 million-a-year Children and Family Court Advisory Service (Cafcas) is ‘not fit for purpose’ and that its incompetence harms the hundreds of thousands of children who need its help.

Aftermath: Cafcas failed to see how the Peter Connelly (Baby P) scandal would impact on child protection agencies

The MPs’ report said that after the Baby P case in November 2008 – in which 17-month-old Peter Donnelly’s mother and two men were jailed over his death – social workers started taking more children into care.

But committee chairman, former Labour minister Margaret Hodge, said: ‘Cafcass was ill-prepared for the very large increase in care cases in 2009-10 which followed the Baby Peter tragedy and caused chaos in the family justice system.

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‘This lack of readiness was a direct result of the organisation’s continued failure to get to grips with the fundamental weaknesses in its culture, management and performance.

‘It is still dealing with a legacy of low morale, unacceptably high levels of sickness absence and under-performance by some staff.’

While the specific impact of the Baby Peter tragedy was ‘hard to predict’, the possibility of a sustained increase in cases ‘was a scenario that Cafcass should have planned for’.

Critical: Margaret Hodge, former Children’s Minister, said the quango was ‘not fit for purpose’

But ‘Cafcass did not see the crisis coming, nor did it have a contingency plan in the event of a significant increase in demand’, the committee said.

Cafcass has also taken ‘too long to secure essential changes, and much of the responsibility lies with top management’.

‘It is shocking that Cafcass has not previously collected all the information it needs to manage its workload more effectively,’ the committee said.

Low compliance by staff with important requirements was ‘a persistent problem’ which undermined the body’s efforts to improve, the MPs added.

There was also a risk that the number of unallocated cases could return to the ‘unacceptable levels seen in summer 2009′.

Cafcass was still not providing a timely service, eight out of 10 Cafcass areas failed Ofsted inspections, and the committee ‘does not share the Department for Education’s confidence that all will be well by 2011′, Mrs Hodge said.

Cafcass took an average of 27 days to fully allocate a care case to a family court adviser, down from up to 40 days between September 2009 and June 2010, but ‘still well above what it should be’, the report found.

It added that data which Cafcass holds on cases centrally ‘contains inaccuracies’.

And sickness absence was ‘unacceptably high’, with an average of 11.6 days per staff member in 2009-10 and 16.1 days for family court advisers, compared with the public sector average of 8.3 days in 2009.

Cafcass said it had taken ‘robust action’ to improve the service.

Chief executive Anthony Douglas said: ‘We will take heed of the PAC findings, and we will continue to defend the interests of the 140,000 children who we work with each year, each of whose cases is unique and many of whose lives we improve as a direct result of our involvement.’

He went on: ‘Cafcass is fit for purpose because we have absorbed a massive number of new cases in the last 12 months and have improved our productivity by 17 per cent, which is a performance any organisation would be proud of.

‘We have improved on every measure considered by the PAC and the National Audit Office, including falling staff sickness, faster filing times of court reports and quicker allocation of cases.’

Too white to adopt: Politically-correct town hall officials tell banker and his wife they can’t give a home to a black or Asian child

By Vanessa Allen and Dennis Rice
Last updated at 4:08 AM on 28th August 2010

Cradling her daughter on her knee, Francesca Polini is every inch the loving, caring mother.

She and her banker husband have good incomes, a spacious home and a close network of family and friends.

But their hopes of parenthood were ini­tially dashed when town hall bureaucrats said they were ‘too white’ to adopt a child.

Adoption row: Francesca Polini and daughter Gaia, from Mexico. Mrs Polini was told there was a cap on white parents adopting black or Asian children

Their rejection meant a child in care was denied the chance of a happy, com­fortable home and a stable future.

And it casts a spotlight on a politically correct adoption system which routinely blocks white couples from giving a home to a child in need.

Mrs Polini, 40, and her husband Rick offered to adopt a black or Asian child, who wait longer for adoption because of a national shortage of ethnic minority couples looking to adopt.

But the couple claim officials in Ealing, West London, told them there was a cap on white parents adopting black or Asian children.

Officially, the council denies such a cap exists, but the case echoes those of other white, middle-class couples who have been barred from adopting for the same reason. Mrs Polini said: ‘The woman didn’t even meet us, she just told us on the phone, “I’m afraid you are too white for us to permit you to adopt one of our children”.

‘There was no assessment, it was based purely on our skin colour, and that shouldn’t be what quali­fies you to adopt. None of this is about the child’s best interests and frankly it’s immoral.’

Faced with their local authori­ty’s refusal to consider them as adoptive parents, the couple had to search abroad for a child to adopt.

Ironically, the same council which had refused their applica­tion to adopt a British child was happy to charge more than £4,000 to vet them for interna­tional adoption.

After overcoming a series of bureaucratic hurdles, they eventu­ally won permission to adopt a girl in Mexico. Gaia, now two, was granted British citizenship last year, and her parents hope to adopt a second child from Mexico.

Currently there are more than 80,000 children and teenagers in care in Britain, and white children are more likely to be adopted than those from ethnic minorities.

Charities including Barnardo’s have called for a radical review of the adoption system, and Mrs Polini is campaigning for an end to ‘caps’ on inter-racial adoption.

The former director of communi­cations at Greenpeace has set up an organisation, Adoption with Humanity, and has written a book about her experiences.

The Department for Children, Schools and Families has apolo­gised to the family for ‘unaccepta­ble and inappropriate’ delays in the handling of their case and has said councils should not bar white cou­ples from adopting black or Asian children.

In a letter to the couple, Ed Balls, then Children’s Secretary, said: ‘We are clear that it is unacceptable for a child to be denied the opportu­nity to grow up in a loving, perma­nent family solely on the grounds that the child and the prospective adopters do not share the same racial or cultural background.

‘These are issues that local authorities should take into account, but they should not act as a “bar” in the way that seems to have happened in your case.’ An Ealing Council spokesman denied it discriminated against white cou­ples, saying: ‘We do not have a pol­icy of same-ethnicity adoption.

‘While an ethnic and cultural match is considered important, it is the overall needs of the child that are given priority, and all potential adopters are considered.

‘Since 2006 we have permanently placed 17 children with families of different ethnic backgrounds, which is 19 per cent of the children placed.’

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/council-at-centre-of-costly-care-case-is-named-2091028.html

Council at centre of costly care case is named

By Mike Dodd and Cathy Gordon, PA

Monday, 27 September 2010

The local authority which tried to take three siblings into care but dropped the case after having run up huge costs in public money can be named today as Coventry City Council.

Judge Clifford Bellamy, who dealt with the original care proceedings, issued a judgment today in which he agreed to a BBC application that the council at the heart of the case should be identified.

In his original judgment, handed down in June, Judge Bellamy criticised the council, which was not being named at that time, over its handling of the case.

He also ordered it to pay a total of £100,000 towards the family’s estimated costs of almost £400,000, which were funded with taxpayers’ money through the Legal Services Commission.

Such a figure, the judge said, was a “matter of concern” in a case where “at the 11th hour” the authority sought leave to withdraw its application for care orders for the three children.

The “wider” costs issue had caused him concern, he said, adding: “In recent times the cost of family legal aid funding has been a matter of governmental concern and public debate.”

It has been reported that expenditure on family legal aid has grown from £399 million in 2001/2002 to £582 million in 2007/2008 – a real-terms increase of 24%.

The judge said: “Although some may say that when it comes to issues relating to the welfare of a child the question of how much the proceedings cost should be secondary to the overriding requirement to achieve an outcome that is in the best interest of the child, this must be tempered by an acceptance that the availability of resources to fund public law Children Act proceedings is not limitless.”

The case related to the authority’s application for care orders in respect of three children, now aged 12, nine and eight, over allegations that their parents subjected them to unnecessary hospital admissions, medical examinations and tests and that this had been achieved by their having lied about or exaggerated the children’s symptoms.

Judge Bellamy said it was a case that fell under the broad categorisation of fabricated or induced illness (FII).

The judge emphasised: “An allegation of FII is a very serious allegation to make against a parent and one that should not be made lightly.

“Before making an allegation of FII a local authority should be rigorous in satisfying itself that the evidence available, if accepted by the court, is capable of establishing to the requisite standard that there has in fact been fabricated or induced illness.”

After re-evaluating the evidence, the council, which issued its application for the care orders in June 2008, had come to the conclusion that there “is no, or very little, material” capable of satisfying the “threshold criteria” for the orders to be made.

The judge described it as a case in which something had gone “badly wrong”.

Costs orders against local authorities were “infrequently made”, but he ruled that “the local authority’s conduct of this case falls outside the band of what is reasonable”.

The family’s costs would in due course be paid by the Legal Services Commission, he said, but ordered the authority to pay £50,000 towards the costs of each parent.

The judge said the authority’s own legal costs “are no doubt also substantial”.

The application for Coventry to be named as the authority responsible was made by the BBC for BBC Coventry and Warwickshire, which wanted to report the case and identify the council. The children’s parents also told the judge they wanted the council to be named.

Barrister Kate Wilson, for the BBC, had argued that the council should be identified because there was a strong public interest in its activities, particularly because of its about-turn in first seeking the children’s immediate removal from their parents then withdrawing the application for care orders.

Other matters of interest included its poor decision-making process, its failure to follow national guidance on dealing with fabricated or induced illness, its failure at the end of the proceedings to consult the children’s guardian, and the financial impact of these failings on the public purse affecting matters of legal aid budgets and questions of how the local authority allocated its funds.

There was also the judge’s finding that the local authority acted outside the range of what was reasonable.

The council said it should remain anonymous because there was a real risk that if it was identified the children involved in the case would also be identifiable.

But the judge rejected that argument, saying it was a very low risk.

He said: “The residents of Coventry have the right to know that the local authority concerned in this was Coventry City Council and the BBC has the right to report that fact.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/8010941/Child-protection-why-did-this-woman-lose-her-children.html

Child protection: why did this woman lose her children?

A new case in south London highlights the ongoing scandal in our social services, reports Christopher Booker.

By Christopher Booker
Published: 6:50PM BST 18 Sep 2010

161 Comments

Mother and child are often torn apart by our system of child protection Photo: Alamy

Nine days ago six policemen, three psychiatric workers and three social workers from the local council arrived outside a house in south London, threatening to beat the door down unless they were given entry. Inside were a mother and her two terrified children, aged nine and 11. Once inside, they removed the mother to a psychiatric hospital under the Mental Health Act, and gave the children to her estranged husband, a solicitor, from whom she parted some years ago because she didn’t consider his promiscuous lifestyle compatible with bringing up two young daughters.

What had this mother done to be robbed of her children and incarcerated alongside psychotics who were drugged to the eyeballs? There is no accusation that she has in any way harmed her daughters, who have been frenziedly texting her asking why they can’t be allowed to come home.

Her problems with the authorities seem to have started some years back when, after the death of her oldest child in a famous hospital, she began writing letters of complaint – first about the hospital, then about other public employees with whom she subsequently had dealings, including social workers and the police.

It became clear to her that they thought she was suffering from a persecution complex. In May, she was called on her mobile by a psychiatrist who asked whether she heard voices. She calmly replied: “The only voice I hear is yours down this telephone.” Last week, she was interviewed in the mental hospital by another psychiatrist. After receiving nothing but sane replies, the baffled expert finally said: “I’ll have to ask the social workers what’s wrong with you.”

Since no court proceedings have been brought against the mother, who has a BSc from a London university, I am free to report all the details of this bizarre case. The decision not to identify those involved is my own. But it would be interesting to know how the council’s social workers think they can justify why she is being held against her will, and why they have handed over her children to someone who doesn’t immediately seem more suitable to care for them than their devoted mother. I shall follow this very odd story until the children are returned to where they obviously wish to be.