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Spying? Stalking? I think not.
This story was on 5 Live yesterday evening. According to the media, Poole Borough Council used "laws to track criminals and terrorists" (the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act) to determine whether they were lying about living in a school catchment area.
So what powers were these? Phone tapping? CCTV cameras pointed at the house 24/7? SWAT teams on standby?
No. They sent a man to check if the family left the house they claimed they lived at each morning and returned there in the afternoon. The BBC did their best to sensationalise this as "spying" - despite listeners texting in telling them to stop trying to 'sex up' their stories. Others went one better, using attention grabbing headlines claiming that 'spies stalked' the family. If this is spying, the government have been 'spying' on suspected benefit cheats for years now. Why is this any different?
Follow up:
Poole Borough Council should be commended for taking action on the issue of people committing fraud to get their kids into a particular school, because for every kid that gets in this way, a child with a legitimate entitlement to a place has to lose out. The council said they'd used the powers twice previously in the past year and on both occasions had found that the parents had lied about where they lived, though in this case the rules were only bent rather than broken so the child's place at the school was not rescinded.
Oh yeah and Liberty are up in arms, describing the investigation as "ridiculous". This is a silly position for Liberty to take and undermines their legitimate concerns over schemes like national DNA databases and ID cards. The (anonymous) mother's "Won't someone think of the children?" response is also pathetic, if predictable.
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4 comments
On the one hand of course the newspapers will sensationalise it thats what newspapers do (although as a publically funded broadcaster we should expect a bit more from the Beeb)
On the other hand (assuming of course the document Ive linked to is genuine) It was a bit more than "sending a man to check". They actually sent a man (or woman) on at least twenty one different occasions to check while there was no record of how long the person spent there on each occasion or their journey time a lot of the visits took place outside of normal office hours. Sounds like quite an expensive little exercise to investigate what hardly amounts to the crime of the century (assuming there was any actual wrongddoing at all) ?
Of course it is one of the few things we can be sure will never happen here (at least not under the current administration at anty rate)
In this case, as I said, the rules were only bent (they were moving house but waited until after the enrolment deadline, having checked on the procedure/criteria with the council apparently) and so it wasn't really wrongdoing, but like I said the previous two occasions seem to have warranted rescinding the place at the school.
I mean what kind of selfish bastard would one have to be to want to put their kids into a good school?
Given that those living within the catchment areas of "failing schools" pay the same taxes as everyone else shouldn’t they be entitled to the same level of public services without having to sell themselves into slavery to a mortgage company (thanks to the publication of league tables) in order to move to a better “catchment area”. (Quite frankly they might as well just send their kids to a fee paying school instead)
Sort out the “failing schools” and you will have fewer parents lying to get a decent education and fewer kids having to travel long distances to school (which isn’t particularly good for either their academic or social development anyway).
if you do a search for Gregory Carlin, Schoolgirl skirt bans, you will also find out what Ms Ruane has planned for us next, she told me so directly in a letter.
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