Thursday - October 01, 2009

A NANNY STATE UPDATE OF SORTS …. WORKING MOMS AND BABIES AND CHILD PROTECTION

Even where there’s no need but ... it’s now in the books. It’s da law.  It’s also pretty stupid as you will see when you read this.

Here a simple sample of the idiocy that is now, this sceptered isle.

DC is Detective Constable

DC Shepherd earns just over £16,000 a year for working part-time, with a take-home wage of £1,000 per month. Edie’s nursery fees are £487 a month.
“The irony is that the state is now having to pay most of my child care because I am a single mother on a low income who works part-time and eligible for working tax credit and 80 per cent of my child care costs. They pay me nearly £500 a month, whereas before they didn’t have to pay me anything.
“The government is trying to promote the return of mothers to work and doing this at the same time.”

Posted this story very recently.  But now the ladies involved are speaking and while some is a rehash, this still makes for a very interesting illustration of this doomed culture.  If you are not familiar with this latest nanny state case, by all means read on.

DC Shepherd and DC Jarrett: “It has been a horrible few months”
DC Leanne Shepherd and DC Lucy Jarrett had no idea that their reciprocal child-care arrangement was illegal – until Ofsted came knocking.
By Neil Tweedie
The Telegraph

The creeping invasion of the state into what was once the preserve of the family and the individual – the databases, the intrusive checks, the inevitably disastrous attempts by bureaucrats to engage in social engineering through the promiscuous use of shoddy legislation and lazily-devised “initiatives” – has become so much a feature of modern life that most of us no longer notice it. Until the day it comes knocking at the door.

For Detective Constable Leanne Shepherd, that day was Friday July 10 of this year when an official from the Office of Standards in Education (Ofsted) called at her home in Milton Keynes, Bedfordshire. A CID officer in Thames Valley Police, she was enjoying a day off with her daughter, Edie, just two-and-a-half years old, when the bell rang.

“She was really lovely, the Ofsted lady,” remembers DC Shepherd. “She said there was a report that I was child-minding illegally. When I asked her what she meant – was I committing a criminal offence or something - she said she wasn’t 100 per cent sure.”

DC Shepherd’s alleged “crime” – and even in the age of the nanny-state-gone-wild, this takes some beating – was to have embarked on an arrangement with her friend, colleague and job-sharing partner, DC Lucy Jarrett, by which they took turns to look after each other’s daughter during days off. It was, according to both women, a “perfect” arrangement that lasted more than two years and allowed them to pursue challenging careers part-time (they conduct investigations together), and spend sufficient time with their first-borns in the years when they needed their mothers most.
There was no rigid pattern to the arrangement – its virtue was its flexibility – but it was reciprocal: each woman received a benefit in the form of two, and occasionally more, days of free child care during most weeks of the year.

This supposedly violates the Childcare Act of 2006, which prohibits adults not registered as child-minders looking after other people’s children for more than two hours a day for reward – the reward being the free care.
Ofsted had been tipped off by someone who must have lived near to DC Shepherd’s house because the Ofsted woman talked of cars coming and going from her property.

“I was in shock the whole time,” remembers the police officer. “I couldn’t imagine I was doing something wrong – I thought I could clear it up if I told her everything. She talked about reciprocal care; I argued that it was an arrangement based on friendship.”
DC Shepherd pointed out that during her maternity leave she had looked after DC Jarrett’s daughter Amy, who is six months older than Edie, purely as an act of kindness. She had received no reciprocal child care at that time.

“She (the Ofsted official) said, ‘I’m just going to check’ and went out to her car to use the phone. She came back and said, ‘You are. You’re breaking the law’.
“Even when she left, I thought that there must be some mistake. I was angry that someone could complain about me – that someone could be so petty – and shocked that what we were doing could be wrong, and that I would have to change everything.”
Seventeen days later a letter arrived from Ofsted ordering DC Shepherd to stop minding Amy immediately, and warning her that she might be subject to surveillance and unannouced visits by Ofsted inspectors.

“I thought it was laughable that they would go the extreme of using surveillance when I was trying to live my life and do my job,” she says, still upset at her treatment.
DC Shepherd, 32, has been single since the end of her relationship with Edie’s father, also a police officer, in November last year. He remains supportive, but without DC Jarrett’s help there is no chance of Edie staying out at home while her mother is on duty, and she has had to be put into a nursery.

“Amy and Edie get on like sisters – they have grown up together. You would always hear them saying ‘you’re my best friend’, ‘I’m your best friend’. They are only-children, so it was nice for them to have each other around.
“Edie went to nursery today and cried her eyes out. It has happened too quickly for her. I haven’t been able to introduce her to it gently. She has still not settled properly – she barely eats there. She asks, ‘Can I see Amy today?’ A two-year-old is not going to understand.”

The enforced change has not only caused her daughter deep distress but has actually cost the government money. DC Shepherd earns just over £16,000 a year for working part-time, with a take-home wage of £1,000 per month. Edie’s nursery fees are £487 a month.
“The irony is that the state is now having to pay most of my child care because I am a single mother on a low income who works part-time and eligible for working tax credit and 80 per cent of my child care costs. They pay me nearly £500 a month, whereas before they didn’t have to pay me anything.

THERE’S A LOT MORE RIGHT HERE AT THE SOURCE.

Posted by peiper     on 10/01/2009 at 01:49 PM   
Filed Under: • CULTURE IN DECLINE • Nanny State • Stoopid-People • UK •  
• Comments (1) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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