I met the Leader of Oxfordshire County Council (OCC) this afternoon. I asked for a meeting after the latest crap OCC action; due to an ‘oversight’ they missed the deadline on my subject access request before they found it (after I chased it up). I wanted to try and explain to him what it was like to experience such relentless crap after LB died [he died?] in provision they commissioned.

He listened. Someone busily typed everything said. He said he didn’t know about some of the points I raised. He’s going to look into why we weren’t informed that OCC were conducting an ‘independent review’ into what happened to LB. Why this supposedly internal review was circulated to various organisations (including NHS England, Southern Health NHS Foundation Trust and Verita) over two weeks before we received a copy. Why we were emailed a copy of this [foul] document without warning at 9am one Monday morning. Why, in the two years since LB died, there is nothing OCC have done that I can call ‘good’.

Why, after everything that’s happened since LB’s death, including producing and circulating a report that should never have seen the light of day, OCC staff seem incapable of thinking; Jeez, their child died in care we commissioned??…/We cocked up with that review. For goodness sake, let’s hurry this FOI through and not wait till the final day before responding…/Blimey. We’ve now ‘lost’ their subject access request??? So and so, make it a priority for the next few days would you? The least we can do is respond in a couple of weeks rather than a month’… And so on.

The content of the review (original and “revised”) is with our solicitor. The meeting today was about process. So that was that. In and out in under 15 minutes. I don’t know if he got any understanding of how much additional distress the public body he leads has caused us. We’ll just have to wait for his response.