John Hemming's Web Log

Ofcom has today imposed financial penalties on four companies under section 130 of the Communications Act 2003 (the “Act”). Penalty notices have been issued to Bracken Bay Kitchens Ltd, Space Kitchens and Bedrooms Ltd, Toucan Residential Ltd (formerly IDT Direct Ltd) and Carphone Warehouse plc, for contravening section 128 of Act by making an excessive amount of silent or abandoned calls. Silent calls can occur when automated calling systems used by call centres generate more calls than the available call centre agents can manage. When the person called answers the telephone and there is no agent available, the automated calling system abandons the call. This can result in the person called experiencing silent on the line when they answer the telephone. Ofcom has imposed the following penalties: Space Kitchens £45,000 Bracken Bay Kitchens £40,000 Carphone Warehouse £35,000 Toucan £32,500

Following discussions with a number of victims of the system of Public Family Law in the UK the suggestion has been put forward that there should be a mass application to the European Court of Human Rights. This would apply under a number of Articles including: ARTICLE 3 PROHIBITION OF TORTURE The maltreatment of pregnant women and women who have just given birth ARTICLE 4 PROHIBITION OF SLAVERY AND FORCED LABOUR Forcing women to give birth and give their baby to the state ARTICLE 5 RIGHT TO LIBERTY AND SECURITY False imprisonment by social services under threat of removing a child ARTICLE 6 RIGHT TO A FAIR TRIAL The whole system fails to operate legally ARTICLE 7 NO PUNISHMENT WITHOUT LAW Being punished with the removal of children for "offences" such as not going to fat club ARTICLE 8 RIGHT TO RESPECT FOR PRIVATE AND FAMILY LIFE There is little respect for family life ARTICLE 9 FREEDOM OF THOUGHT, CONSCIENCE AND RELIGION Such issues as home education coming in to family pro...

BABIES ARE BEING SNATCHED FOR ADOPTION JOHN HEMMING IS RIGHT, says Consumer Group FROM The Association for Improvements in the Maternity Services (AIMS) The government is denying that social workers are targeting babies for adoption. Listening to desperate calls from pregnant women or mothers of new babies and toddlers on our help-line would quickly show their denials are not true. Health visitors are often instructed to give all parents a “risk rating”, if possible while the child is still in the womb, or soon after the birth - this is done without parents’ knowledge or consent. The questionnaire used is highly inaccurate as a predictive tool, and has a very high rate of false positives. Pregnant teenagers, the unemployed, anyone with a history of mental illness, and so on, are on the watch list - supposedly so that they can get extra support, but it is often simply extra surveillance. Midwives are instructed to report risk factors, and are losing the trust of the women the...

WPC Yvonne Fletcher Q: To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs what (a) recent steps she has taken and (b) steps she plans to take to bring the person who murdered WPC Yvonne Fletcher in 1984 to justice. A: Metropolitan Police Service officers last visited Libya to pursue the case in December 2006. We regularly raise the case with the Libyan authorities and I have done so myself. We continue to press for resolution of the case.(Kim Howells, Minister of State (Middle East), Foreign & Commonwealth Office)

Actually Graffiti and Iraq, really. We did one of our traditional door knocking sessions this morning. The most frequently raised issue was Graffiti, but Iraq was the second most frequently raised issue. The feeling was generally positive which bodes well for the next local elections. Politicalbetting.com share my view that Labour cannot afford an early general election. The question, of course, is whether things get worse for them as we go down the track or not.

A quote from the Daily Mail (yesterday's article see link). Liam himself said: "There's a lot about my childhood I can't remember. There's a lot I can remember and wish I couldn't. The best I can say about it is that it's over, and that I learned a lot, that will probably make me a better person in the end." He was in and out of Islington's care from the age of two, and witnessed his birth mother suffer domestic violence and descend into drug addiction. When he was nine she died of a heroin overdose. The distraught, vulnerable boy was initially fostered by a motherly woman who asked to keep him. But the council instead sent him, from age five to 11, to a 'therapeutic' boarding school, New Barns in Gloucestershire. This was later closed following a child abuse and pornography scandal. During school holidays he was fostered by a man later imprisoned for abusing another child in his care. When Liam was nine, Islington placed him in its childre...

“Obesity in itself is not a child protection concern,” he said. “When parents fail to act in their child’s best interests with regard to their weight — for example, if they are enrolled on a behav-ioural treatment session and only get to two out of 10 sessions or if they miss medical appointments — then the obesity becomes a child protection concern.” Dr Alyson Hall, consultant child psychiatrist at the Emmanuel Miller Centre for Families and Children in east London, said that in some cases children were put into foster care to ensure their safety. So if the Fat Police tell you to go to a "behavioural treatment session" and you miss some of the sessions then your children are taken off you. We cannot rely on the courts to protect children and families from this major abuse of state power as they (apart from a few honourable exceptions such as Macfarlane and Munby) tend to rubberstamp proposals from Social Services. As always it is necessary to see all of the details. I don...

It is good that she has not been forgotten by the government. The written answer to a question I asked recently is linked. Although one can relax to some extent about diplomats not paying the congestion charge the events with Yvonne Fletcher is not one to let drop. It is good that police officers have visited Libya recently.

The BBC website has run the story about adoption targets. It is quite easy to spot a situation where the Social workers are trying to steal a baby. Firstly, they prevent the baby remaining with the mother. Secondly, they argue that noone else in the family (grandparents, aunts, uncles etc) is good enough to look after the baby and then they gradually reduce contact. In the mean time the Family Courts rubber stamp the proposals from the social workers. One woman (from Buckinghamshire) who tried to run away with her baby was sentenced earlier this month to a year in prison for doing so. She is not a threat to society. If the prisons are full why is she locked up. I am still collating the figures to make a more precise calculation as to the numbers of babies stolen by social workers each year.

The link (which may go away) is to a story from Cornwall. The key quotes are: "Social services took me from a bad place with my mother to somewhere which was even worse," she said. "I just wanted to die there. I just hated it. I just cried and cried but I was just told that I had emotional problems. and "This is clearly a very concerning and thankfully an isolated incident, which does not reflect the immense amount of good work and high quality care that is provided by almost 500 carers within the Cornwall County Council Foster Care and Short Break Service, who look after children from the county during approximately 12,000 placements that are made each year," said a council statement. It is important to remember that Foster Parents are normally very good people. This is an exceptional, but sadly not unique incident. The key point is that if too many children are taken into care then the pressures on the system grow so that marginal carers are used when if ther...

We have now agreed the leaflet about the baby stealers. The members of some of the organisations supporting "justice for families" will be distributing copies of the leaflet (see link) which tells people how to fight the baby stealers. Anyone who wishes to help should print a couple of hundred copies of the leaflet (See link) and hand it out to visitors to the local maternity unit. The baby stealers must be stopped.

Twas one of those things. We were all set up to have a vote on the adjournment, but had not been warned that the first vote was on that the vote be now put. That was not supposed to be a division, but noone had told me and the Nats. I then asked who was running the second call. I was told that there were tellers so went into the Lobby. The tellers did not do the second call and lo and behold there was no vote and the second division was not called. C'est la vie. That's "proceedings in parliament" for you. Next time David Howarth and I will whip the vote.

Simvastatin Q: To ask the Secretary of State for Health what estimate she has made of the effects on costs to the public purse of prescribing Simvastatin instead of Atorvastatin or other branded statins; and what the timetable is for Simvastatin to be prescribed instead of branded statins. A: The NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement recently published the "Better Care, Better Value" indicators for the second quarter of this financial year. The statins indicator shows that if every primary care trust (PCT) achieved levels of prescribing of lower cost statins similar to the top quarter of PCTs then £84.7 million could be released for patient care. There are no targets, but we expect PCTs and clinicians to be aware that they can help treat more patients by prescribing one of the lower cost statins where it is clinically appropriate. (Caroline Flint, Minister of State (Public Health), Department of Health)

Foundation Trusts Q: To ask the Secretary of State for Health if she will change the relevant rules to give members of Governors Councils of Foundation Trusts who are not members of committees of the Council the right to attend meetings of those committees. A: The circumstances of each national health service foundation trust (NHSFT) are different, which is why the legislative framework for NHSFTs gives them freedoms of local flexibility to tailor their governance arrangements to their individual circumstances and those of their community, over and above minimum legal requirements. It is up to each NHSFT to consider whether to set up committees or sub-committees of its board of governors and determine the circumstances under which these should operate. Schedule 1 of the Health and Social Care Act 2003 states that the constitution of each NHSFT must include details on the practice and procedure for the board of governors, and may also make other provision about the board of governors a...

A mild row is going on about EDM 626. (link on edmi) That is the EDM that says: That this House notes that local authorities and their staff are incentivised to ensure that children are adopted; is concerned about increasing numbers of babies being taken into care, not for the safety of the infant, but because they are easy to get adopted; and calls urgently for effective scrutiny of care proceedings to stop this from happening. It is worth doing some analysis on the evidence for this EDM. This part: local authorities and their staff are incentivised to ensure that children are adopted; Is incontravertible. There has been a targeting system for getting children adopted from care for some time. A visit to CSCI will demonstrate the pressure on local authorities and their staff to increase adoptions from care. Doing so would be a laudable objective if it meant that children who otherwise would remain in foster care got adopted. However, if it means that children would otherwise re...

Although the Court of Appeal decided that Blair wasn't required by law to answer questions today, the battle for effective government continues. I will post the judgment on my website when it is available. Now I need to see whether I can use other routes to make Ministers answer questions.

Who says so? Ans: The Government (actually Audit Commission) See the link.

Actually tomorrow is the first time that the definition of "Proceedings in parliament" has been considered in court. I thought it had been considered by the 1958 Scrap Cables case when the Judicial Committee considered the issue of a letter written by an MP to a minister. However, Erskine May was wrong on this and in fact it did not consider this. The interesting point is that if a letter written by an MP to a Civil Servant is a "proceeding in parliament" then so is a court action by an MP in the Court of Appeal. What this means that if I lose and the Treasury Solicitors try to get me to pay the costs then because the action is a proceeding in parliament I am covered by the rules relating to Contempt. That means that the Committee on Standards and Privileges can send the Treasury Solicitors and their Boss, the Chief Minister of the Treasury, (aka the Prime Minister) to the Tower. If I win, however, then I win and he has to answer questions. It is a difficult one...

The surge in the numbers of healthy white babies being taken into care continues. Parents and Grandparents are mystified as to why their babies are being taken off them. The mothers feel like unpaid surrogate mothers. However, this will help the government to hit their targets in increasing the percentage of children in care that are adopted. It is relatively easy to find a family for a healthy white baby. The only problem is that these children already have families. The babies health is damaged by Social Services preventing breastfeeding (Dagenham) or making breastfeeding difficult. Sadly the Family Courts remain mainly secret. This monstrous evil, therefore, is kept out of the newspapers and magazines. Parents are still being forced to sign gagging orders that go well beyond the legal requirement.

If I am lucky I may visit the Court of Appeal twice next week. I am working on some papers for a second Appeal as well as the one I am going on Tuesday. Both have substantial significance, but one is Family Division and hence covered by confidentiality at the moment.