When I started as a press officer in local government I used to think that I needed to protect the good name of the council at all times… and then I met councillors.
Now, I don’t mean this as disparagingly as this may sound. Let me explain.
Councillors are people who get elected to make decisions on behalf of their community. Some of them are great, some average and some poor. If you are poor there’s a strong chance you won’t get re-elected.
I had a moment of clarity a few years into that local government comms job. In short it was this: ‘I can give advice but if they want to ignore it that’s on them.’
It was a real transformational moment. So, when Councillors made poor decisions after advice that was on them.
As a result of this moment of understanding, when live streaming meetings became a thing in local government I was intensely relaxed. ‘What if Councillor X speaks? I was asked. ‘He can come over as an idiot. And Councillor Y? She’s even worse.’
Well, maybe democracy is better served by seeing just how much of an idiot they are.
We have seen this before. ‘You do not have the authority, Jackie Weaver,’ roared a Handforth Parish Councillor in a viral internet clip. As we saw, poor behaviour can get called out.
And so, we come to Warwickshire County Council. Or rather certain Warwickshire County Councillors at the January 25 children and young person’s scrutiny committee. The issue of the spiralling costs of special needs help in schools was brought up.
As a country, we are better at diagnosing children and we have a better idea of what tools are needed. It’s just austerity has cut budgets to the bone so the help desperately needed isn’t readily available. Lockdown has also caused a tsunami of mental health problems for UK school children.
The BBC have covered the news story of the out-of-touch Councillors here. Step forward Cllr Jeff Morgan who wondered if this was just children ‘behaving badly’. Councillor Brian Hammersley wondered if there was ‘something in the water’ while Councillor Clare Golby noticed darkly when she went online that parents were ‘swapping notes on how to get their children diagnosed’ as if this was some kind of tax fraud.
‘There must have been better ways of dealing with them back them,’ was another quote.
It’s worth remembering that back then people were put into asylums for life where they were mistreated. In Glasgow, children were put in Lennox Castle, built in 1830, where they were threatened, mistreated. They were left there for decades. The site only closed in 2002. There were scores of places like this.
As others have said, we didn’t see them when we were at school because they were often locked up elsewhere and out of sight. There’s always been special needs.
As the parent of a child who has special needs my hand hit my forehead in despair. The laziness and reckless lack of curiosity here is reckless. For elected members who are making decisions it is dangerous bordering on malfeasance. It is causing real harm.
To answer those questions: No, it’s probably not. No, it definitely isn’t and yes, parents do swap notes to help them jump through hoops because the hoops are made deliberately difficult to put parents off. In the UK, the wait for an autism diagnosis is 10 months just to be seen. That’s the first meeting in a long process that takes years to complete. Without the diagnosis there is often little help and the child suffers.
Other parents with children have also felt this with fury. On TikTok, a creator who is from the West Midlands but now lives in the US, launched a broadside:
Elsewhere, on the internet the reaction from parents was similarly marked.
Where this plays out
In the olden days, this may have been a newspaper letters column. Today, it is Facebook groups for parents whose children with special needs online and in traditional media.
It’s also TikTok and in large numbers. There is a community of parents with children with special needs who came to the fore during this story.
But it only gets taken seriously when it leaks through to the traditional media as it did here. BBC news picking this up made it a story. Other news organisations followed.
So, is this a reputational disaster for the council?
This is where it gets interesting because it depends.
Having the three Councillors show their ignorance on it’s own is a great service to the community. The community can then act accordingly at the ballot box. Democracy dies in darkness, as the Washington Post says.
If this stimulates a debate that shows the harm that kids are suffering then maybe some good will come out of it.
I’m not going to go into a critique of what Warwickshire County Council does next. No shade to their comms team. It’s a hard enough job and they have some good people.
The principles of crisis communications need to be the compass are here.