Thank you very much for all your support so far; I want to share a bit more of our story with you.
We were very reluctant at putting the page up for many reasons, the main one being we feel incredibly vulnerable to the potential backlash from the Local Authority (LA ) and ICB. They have several strategies they use to assert their control. We and other friends have experienced all of these, including use of Court of Protection (CoP) which effectively is a gagging order, destabilising care, ignoring and threatening, and trying to remove Deputyship using defamation and parent blame so they can take control of your child’s life. They appear to have a mammoth budget from the public purse to do all this.
Our experience of LA in court is they drown the judge in paper and consequently the evidence gets lost. Their fabrications and defamations are not obvious to the judge as the judge doesn’t know you. We have had experience of this a couple of times. We have friends who have been stuck in the CoP for years at a time. LAs dodge doing their duties at the cost of the public purse, while parents are bankrupted by the cost of solicitors. Most cases can take 4-6 months at the cost of tens of thousands of pounds, and are all-consuming, very stressful experiences.
We feel we have been left with no other choice but to share our story publicly. They came for Rohan for the first time in January 2022, then in March 2022, then November 2023, and they have come for him again two weeks ago. If we don’t expose this they will try again and again, and not just for our son. We see it as our responsibility to expose this for what it is, to protect not just Rohan but all the others out there. We want to raise in excess of £20,000 so we can help other families and change the way law is enforced for public bodies.
In their last letter to us on Friday our ICB brought up safeguarding concerns they had about me, relating to a meeting over a month ago with the ICB. However, they have not shared what they are, they have not evidenced them, and they have not investigated them. This is because it is a sham! There are no concerns. This is a ruse to attempt to drag us into CoP and remove our deputyship again. Last November they claimed:
“ RN’s mother and father are currently jointly court appointed deputies for health and welfare and property and financial affairs decisions for RN but there are concerns from the LA and ICB that RN’s mother may not be acting in RN’s best interests. The application will seek to invite the OS to act as litigation friend for RN in light of the concerns raised about RN’s mother not acting in his best interests, and our understanding that RN’s father does not dispute her position”.
If we didn’t have Rohan’s best interests at heart, why did we fight day and night with his solicitor and spend £23k from our own savings to keep him at home? We find these claims untrue and insulting.
If we can share this campaign with ten thousand people and each person donates £10, this will give us £100,000 to help Rohan, other families we know, and create reform in the care sector. Please donate and share.
