By Gavin Mackintosh-
A social worker has been named and shamed by a judge for altering care records to make them more critical of a mother.
Linda Frazer was refused permission by Justice Baker to appeal findings from a March 2016 Family Court ruling handed down by District Judge Exton. The appeal bid was heard in July last year, but Baker’s judgment has only been made public this week.
Fraser edited care records in order to make them more critical of a mother of two children working as a consultant social worker for Bristol council. The judge concluded the edits were made to help “bolster” the council’s position during care proceedings. No care order was made in the case, and Exton ordered that Fraser be named in a published version of the ruling. The identity of social workers is often protected in legal cases because of the valuable profession they occupy, and to generally prevent scaring potential applicants away from the highly demanded profession.
Shamed Frazer conceded she must have altered the records but said she could not remember doing so. She denied that she had edited the logs to strengthen her local authority’s case and denied lying in her evidence to the court.
The social worker’s appeal relied on her claims to have been under enormous stress at the time, with significant health problems worsening her state of mind. Her lawyer argued judge Exton overlooked medical evidence of her condition, failed to engage with the concessions made, and delivered a judgment amounting to an “inadequate analysis of the totality of the evidence”. Naming her publicly was unjust, her lawyer argued. How wrong he was, the judge’s decision was right. Frazer’s lawyer was talking nonsense because there is no excuse for a professional social worker to manipulate facts to suit herself or her organisation.
Judge Baker dismissed the waffling arguments of the lawyer, adding that the finding that the social worker had altered the records was unchallenged, her claim that she could not recall what happened was “unassailable”, and judge Exton was “entirely within her discretion” to draw her conclusions on the social worker’s motive. There was no real prospect, he said, of an appeal court concluding that the previous judge’s decisions were wrong or unfair.
Baker insisted that Exton had drawn on her “experience in assessing witnesses” when rejecting this suggestion, and found no reason to think the social worker’s powers of recall “were affected in any way, particularly when the events she was being asked to recall occurred only eleven days previously”.
Baker said Exton’s findings had illustrated the points made by the mother’s representative in the original case.
Baker concluded: “In my judgment, there is no real prospect of an appellate court concluding that the judge was wrong or unfair. Permission to appeal is therefore refused.” The finding is a shameful reminder of the level of corruption that take place among professionals who ought to be above board and of high standing. Here, we have a social worker who was faking facts to get somebody else in trouble. What kind of woman was this entrusted with such a respectable position?
A Bristol council spokesperson told the eye of media.com: “This was an isolated case where the court found that one officer had acted in an inappropriate manner, falling short of the level of professionalism we expect of our social workers.
“Those actions do not reflect the high standards set by our social workers whose ‘persistence and don’t give up approach’ were features of feedback received from Ofsted in 2014.
“We are proud of the high quality of social care they deliver, whilst providing vital support to some of the city’s most vulnerable children and families.”