Gagging clauses: Chris Grayling silenced justice charities to stop them revealing what a fool he is
Grayling: What does a fool do to prevent his stupidity becoming public knowledge? He gags everybody in the know.
The Times‘ investigation into the Tory government’s use of non-disclosure agreements (gagging clauses) to prevent outside organisations from saying anything that would damage their reputation continues.
Today the focus is on current Transport Secretary Chris ‘Failing’ Grayling and the disastrous changes to the probation service that he demanded when he was in charge of Justice.
We all know that his ideas were stupid, short-sighted and dangerous because we have seen their result – but it seems we could have found this out much earlier, if he had not silenced every organisation that could have told us at the time.
Here‘s the report:
Chris Grayling’s changes to the probation service were deemed to be a failure, but charities dealing with the fallout were prevented from saying anything that would damage his reputation
After Chris Grayling oversaw a £3 billion overhaul of the probation system in 2015, his reforms were condemned as a failure.
Prison inspectors found that changes introduced when he was justice secretary resulted in criminals being released without anywhere to live and without staff assessing “significant risks” to their partners and children.
Dame Glenys Stacey, chief inspector of probation, said the overhaul meant there was “no real prospect” of preventing prisoners from returning to crime.
The findings prompted criticism from campaigners, politicians and probation staff. Some of the key charities working with former prisoners, however, have appeared to be unconcerned.
The rest is hidden by the paywall but you get the idea.
Labour’s Richard Burgon commented on Twitter…
Gagging charities to stop them speaking out about the disastrous part-privatisation of probation is yet another example of how privatisation in justice has undermined transparency and accountability. https://t.co/vKqVqSsXGS
— Richard Burgon MP (@RichardBurgon) November 7, 2018
That’s putting it mildly!
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I think it’s about time we the “Hard Working Tax Payer”, or “The VAT Paying Public” was told how much these vanity, off a fag packet changes, especially UC, has cost us and weather any of these changes actually saved us any money.
The conservative government could not tell the truth about any thing at all universal credit is a shambles why should poor people be worse off in money wiser we are going backwards not forward this government is a shambles too many people have died because of their incompetence should be abolished all to gether car they they see what they are doing to this country or are they just not interested I’m all right jack sod you is the attitude of them all
These people are in it for what they can get out of it pure and simple and we need to find a way of making them learn that they are there to serve rather than serve themselves!