Bristol's external communications team hitting the headlines again
Bristol City Council has been spying on SEND parents in order to brand them as troublemakers to a parent carers charity, a leaked email suggests. One parent’s wedding pictures were trawled through and a picture was distributed to council employees.
This exclusive was published first in The Bristolian, the city’s newspaper that doesn’t flinch from speaking the truth.
The spying is incontrovertible. The council admitted to it in their response to the press. Commissioning Manager Jess Baugh, who according to her LinkedIn profile is an advanced health practitioner at BCC, sent a list of information to two unknown people (and several others cc’d) about two SEND parents.
She included links to Twitter, the number of FOI requests submitted by a parent, links to articles, one parent’s Twitter bio, and Facebook posts & photos from the parents’ personal pages.
The purpose of these dossier compilation appears to be to brand the parents as council critics. This officer is not the only person involved with the spying and we still don’t know who ordered it.
Baugh writes, “Ginny and other colleagues have all been working hard to uncover some more concrete evidence in order to support you to address this.” There is no reference in the email about what they are helping others address and why they are potentially breaching GDPR and RIPA legislation in order to do this.
At one point, Baugh adds a link to a Tweet by one of the parents and says, “external comms deduced this is [redacted], as image is the same as wedding photos on xx's personal Facebook site.”
The wedding photo, which external comms trawled through a personal profile page to find and compare to a Twitter account they were already monitoring, was then attached to the email.
We know that the outgoing Director of Education Alison Hurley knows about the spying and the compilation of potentially more than one dossier because she was copied in to the email. That was a year ago now.
I contacted the press office, who were the ones trawling through Facebook pages, and I asked them for a comment. There was no reply.
The cabinet member for education, children and equalities is Cllr Asher Craig. You’ve read about her behaviour to residents on social media (namely me), in the following story, and her attitude to being questioned.
The external communications team are not unknown to the public either. They were recently in the news when the head of external communications, Saskia Konynenburg, queried not only a journalist’s question at a mayor’s press briefing, but also his right to ask it. This led to the banning of the Local Democracy Reporter Alex Seabrook and then the boycotting of the briefings by almost the entirety of Bristol’s local media, with support from the NUJ.
The external comms team then told the Radio 4 program, The Media Show, that there was a longstanding agreement for LDRs not to come to press briefings.
This statement did not reflect reality. See the montage below. It shows that LDRs Adam Postans, Amanda Cameron and Alex Seabrook had been attending the pressers for years.
I’m not sure how any of the council employees involved with this blatant violation of residents’ trust and legal right to privacy can stay in their publicly funded positions.
They need to start considering their next steps or we’ll never be able to trust what the council says again.
Unbelievable and sinister