Wednesday, July 22, 2026

Social worker who stole £10,000 from client spared jail...

A social worker who stole £10,000 from a man she had met when he was a client has been handed a suspended prison sentence.

Tabitha Hall was a senior social worker, responsible for managing supervisors who run social workers in the north of the county.

As part of that role, she worked with the man when he was a client but after his social care was stopped, she continued to visit him weekly without any authority.

The man then employed a personal assistant to help him and he told her that Hall had taken two separate amounts of £5,000 from his bank account and transferred it to hers.

An investigation was launched with Hall being suspended from her role. Police were called and in an interview, Hall told officers that she continued to see the man as his unofficial social worker and friend.

She said the first £5,000 she took was to pay for her child’s new boiler and the second was because her debt was getting out of hand so she asked to extend the ‘loan’.

In a victim impact statement, the man said: “I am struggling to sleep due to this happening to me and my anxiety level is now very high.

“I trusted her and she was my friend. She has let me down and betrayed me.”

Hall, 42, of Springbank Road, Chesterfield, was subsequently charged with fraud by abuse of position.

More - 
 https://www.derbyshire.police.uk/news/derbyshire/news/news/north/2026/july/social-worker-who-stole-10000-from-client-spared-jail/

Sunday, July 19, 2026

RSA Whistleblower Files...

Meridian Legal Services had forced RSA / Intact Insurance UK into a regulatory hold. Financial Ombudsman Service had the insurer’s internal case file. An investigator was about to be assigned.

This is the recap. If you’ve read all 112 episodes, most of this will be familiar - think of it as the file you’d hand someone new, or the one you’d want on record. If you’ve never read a single one, this is the whole thing, without needing to open 112 tabs.

One more thing before I start. Every section below ends with the specific episode numbers that section is drawn from. That’s deliberate.

If you’re a journalist, a lawyer, another policyholder, or just someone who wants to check a claim against the original documents rather than take my word for it, those episode numbers are your way in. Click through to the relevant number and you’ll find the actual emails, metadata, letters, and regulator correspondence behind whatever I’ve summarised here. Nothing in this episode is meant to stand on its own - it’s a map, not the territory.

(Covered in: EP109, EP110, EP111, EP112)


Who I am and how this started

I’m Artur. I’m a CNC programmer from Birmingham. I work with CNC precision machining. Numbers, tolerances, measurements that either match the drawing or they don’t.

In September 2020, I noticed a crack running through my kitchen wall. Then more, outside, where my house meets the neighbour’s. Subsidence. I called my insurer, RSA, and reported it, expecting the process to be roughly what it says on the tin: investigate, find the cause, fix it.

Almost six years later, I’m still living with cracks in the walls. Along the way I found something I didn’t expect to find ...

(Covered in: EP1, “I never planned to be a whistleblower,” “How an insurance fight took space inside my family life,” “What 1,000 cases and 100 episodes taught me”)


The moment everything changed: a Subject Access Request (DSAR)

In November 2024, I did something every UK resident is entitled to do under GDPR: I asked my insurer for a copy of everything they held on me - a Data Subject Access Request, or DSAR.

What came back didn’t match my memory of the last four years.

There were complaints in the file that I never made. There were documents dated years earlier than the metadata said they were created. There were 73 files redacted so completely that even my own emails, sent back to me, had been blacked out. Dozens more were simply missing. Around 140 files witheld.

I’m not a lawyer, a journalist, or an investigator by training. I’m someone who reads technical drawings for a living, so when the paperwork stopped matching the timeline, I noticed, and I started keeping a forensic record of every discrepancy - dates, metadata, reference numbers, who sent what and when.

That record became this series.

(Covered in: EP1, EP2, EP3)


The three complaints I never made. Fabricated by Insurers.

Three complaints appear in RSA’s records under my name:

• 30 January 2024 (ref 01/24540759)

• 26 September 2024 (ref 09/24576994)

• 7 December 2024 (ref 12/24587074)

None of them has a contact record, a complaint form, or a verification trail behind it. The third one, RSA’s own correspondence shows, was built from what was actually a routine follow-up email to their Data Protection Officer about my DSAR - not a complaint at all.

Here’s the pattern that took me months to see clearly: every one of those three dates was followed, within days, by RSA’s standard “Thank you for contacting us” acknowledgment letter. My two genuine, recorded-delivery complaints - 2 October and 16 December 2024 - never received one.

I started calling that letter the fraud marker. It only ever showed up after something I didn’t send.

Why would a company do this? My own theory, laid out across dozens of episodes with the paperwork attached: each fabricated complaint gave RSA a new reference number and a new start date, which let them argue they’d already dealt with an issue, or that a deadline hadn’t been missed, or that my real complaint could be filed away as a duplicate of one that never happened.

(Covered in: EP4, EP5, EP7, EP12, EP13, EP21, EP24, EP25, EP26, EP27, EP28, EP29)


The documents fabricated in 83 minutes

On 30 April 2024, three documents appeared in my claim file: a Schedule of Works, a Certificate of Structural Adequacy, and a Form of Acceptance. Carried dates suggesting they were years old - 2021, specifically.

The metadata said otherwise. Created and modified within an 83-minute window, on 30 April 2024, by the same member of staff.

The Certificate of Structural Adequacy went further: it credited a specific engineer’s advice for a tree-removal decision made in 2021. That engineer wasn’t hired until 2023. He couldn’t have advised on something that happened two years before he was involved. I flagged this in writing, repeatedly.

RSA’s response, when it eventually came in a Final Decision Letter, called this “poor attention to detail.” A later Ombudsman decision called it “simple human error.” Neither addressed how a document can be authored in 2021 and modified in 2024 at the same time, or how an engineer can advise on an event that predates his involvement by two years.

(Covered in: EP6, EP8, EP9, EP17, EP18, EP19, EP20, EP31, EP36, EP69, EP70)


The files that vanished, and the ones that were blacked out

My DSAR should have returned a complete file. Instead: 73 documents fully redacted (including, again, my own outgoing emails), and by my count somewhere 70+ further documents missing outright - concentrated, tellingly, around the period of the fabricated September complaint.

One example I’ve come back to more than once: a site-visit report, released to me with every line redacted except one - “The entire meeting was video recorded by the insured’s son.” That sentence survived. Everything describing what was found at the visit did not.

I complained to the ICO twice. Both times, I’ll walk you through what happened to that complaint in a moment.

(Covered in: EP11, EP37, EP45, EP46, EP95)


Round two: the same pattern, in the monitoring data

I assumed, for a while, that the fabrication problem belonged to 2024. Then, in 2025, RSA (rebranding mid-dispute to Intact Insurance UK) ran a six-month monitoring programme on a second problem tree - referred to throughout the series as T5 - that a regulator had specifically ordered them to investigate.

The monitoring point closest to T5 moved 2.3mm downward over six months, with zero recovery across all seven readings - the largest, most one-directional movement of any monitored point on the property. I was told this proved “stability.”

When I asked for the original monitoring files, the April data arrived as a full spreadsheet, properly attributed to the surveying firm. Every month after that arrived only as a PDF: no author, creation dates over a week after the actual survey, and - I later discovered - one of them containing invisible text, embedded but not displayed, findable only by selecting the page and pasting it into a plain text editor.

I don’t think that happens by accident.

(Covered in: EP76, EP77, EP78, EP82, EP83, EP84, EP85, EP86, EP87, EP88, EP89, EP90, EP91, EP92, EP93, EP94)


What FOS did with all of this

This is the part of the story that, honestly, took the longest to accept.

The Financial Ombudsman Service is the free, independent service that’s supposed to resolve exactly this kind of dispute. Over five-plus years, I brought them the fabricated complaints, the backdated documents, and the manipulated monitoring data, more than once, in detail, with evidence attached.

Here’s what I got back, in the regulator’s own words, at different points in the case:

“Artur, I cannot do anything” - the first investigator, when shown proof a complaint had been fabricated, told me it would need to be raised as a brand-new complaint rather than folded into the case already open.

“Your further supporting evidence… hasn’t changed my review of the complaint” - a second investigator, 72 hours after receiving over 500 pages of forensic evidence.

On the backdated Schedule of Works: the Ombudsman accepted RSA’s explanation that the date was a “printing error” - that downloading or printing a document stamps today’s date on it - despite the file’s own metadata recording a creation date, not a print date.

On the false attribution to an engineer who wasn’t hired until two years later: “I can’t see any detriment that Mr N has suffered as a result of this minor and relatively insignificant error.”

Most recently, on the T5 monitoring question: between 19 December 2025 and 15 January 2026, one investigator gave me four different positions on whether RSA had complied with a binding order - non-compliant, then not non-compliant, then “up to the discretion of the investigator,” then a specific evidence threshold I’d already met weeks earlier, then finally: “So, it’s a new complaint. I hope that helps.”

A Freedom of Information request I filed to understand FOS’s own fraud-handling procedures took over a year, three refusals, and a phantom reference number generated for a request I never made, before I learned something that explained a lot: FOS’s own case-management system doesn’t record “document fabrication” as a complaint category at all.

(Covered in: EP14, EP15, EP21, EP40, EP41, EP55, EP56, EP57, EP58, EP59, EP60, EP61, EP62, EP63, EP67, EP68, EP69, EP70, EP71, EP72, EP73, EP74, EP75, EP79, EP80, EP97, EP98, EP99, EP100, EP101, EP102, EP103, EP104, EP105, EP106, EP107, EP108)


What ICO did with it

The Information Commissioner's Office exists to enforce data protection law. I sent them the 73 redacted files, the missing documents, and evidence my data had been shared with third parties without a clear lawful basis.

Their first outcome: they said they were “unable to determine” whether RSA had complied with the law, and asked RSA’s own Data Protection Officer to review RSA’s own handling and report back in 14 days. RSA’s DPO’s review concluded the redactions were “appropriate.” That was accepted, no further questions asked.

When I filed a second, far more detailed complaint months later - 350-plus pages, covering everything the first complaint hadn’t - the ICO closed it as a “duplicate” of the first, without reviewing the new evidence.

(Covered in: EP46, EP64, EP65, EP66, EP81, EP95)


What FCA and SFO did with it

Both were copied on nearly every escalation in this case from January 2025 onward: the fraud alerts, the formal complaints, an open offer of full access to my underlying evidence. Neither is on record, anywhere in this series, taking a documented substantive action.

(Covered in: EP22, EP24, EP27, EP29, EP43, EP47, EP51, EP52, “When Every Watchdog in Britain Suddenly Goes Blind”)


Why I don’t think this is just about me

Two things convinced me this isn’t a one-off.

First: in 2023, a legal representative named Gary Smith won a landmark High Court case against FOS over roughly £500 million in mis-sold timeshare compensation for around 20,000 families. After he won, by his account, the compensation largely didn’t get paid - and at least 26 of his clients died still waiting. He’s now preparing a second judicial review, built on more than 1,000 documented FOS cases.

Second: reviews from FOS’s own current and former staff describe an organisation under pressure to hit closure targets set by executives who, in one reviewer’s words, “have never worked a day in the Investigator role” - producing, in that reviewer’s phrase, “rushed, sloppy investigations.”

None of that proves my case. But it’s hard to read alongside everything above and conclude I just had unusually bad luck three separate times, with three separate regulators.

(Covered in: EP98, “ONE LEGAL EXPERT EXPOSED THE UK CONSUMER PROTECTION FRAUD,” “THE WATCHDOG HAS NO TEETH,” “What 1,000 cases and 100 episodes taught me”)


Where things stand now

As of this episode: Claim 202009030674 remains on official regulatory hold. RSA/Intact’s contractor has been stood down. All demands for site access have been withdrawn. 

 https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ep113-rsa-whistleblower-files-whole-story-so-far-six-years-nadolny-dov2e/

Sanctions against PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP and Mr John Waters...

This Press notice concerns the outcome of an investigation into the relevant Statutory Audit Firm and Statutory Auditor (as defined in the FRC’s Audit Enforcement Procedure). It would not be fair to treat any part of this announcement as constituting or evidencing an investigation into, or findings in respect of the conduct of, any other persons or entities.

Executive Counsel of the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) has issued a Final Settlement Decision Notice (FSDN) under the Audit Enforcement Procedure and imposed sanctions against PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) and John Waters, audit engagement partner, in relation to the statutory audit of the consolidated financial statements of Babcock International Group Plc (Babcock) for the financial years ended 31 March 2019 (FY2019) and 31 March 2020 (FY2020).

The sanctions are:

PwC:

  • A financial sanction of £3,248,437 (this figure reflects a starting point of £5,500,000, discounted for the mitigating factor of exceptional cooperation by 12.5%, and further discounted for admissions and early disposal by 32.5%);
  • A published statement in the form of a Severe Reprimand;
  • An order requiring PwC to take specified action with the aim of preventing the recurrence of the contravention; and
  • A declaration that the FY2019 and FY2020 Audit reports signed on behalf of PwC did not satisfy the Relevant Requirements in relation to the matters set out in the FSDN.

Mr Waters:

  • A financial sanction of £59,062 (this figure reflects a starting point of

£100,000, discounted for the mitigating factor of exceptional cooperation by 12.5%, and further discounted for admissions and disposal by 32.5%).

  • A published statement in the form of a Severe Reprimand; and
  • A declaration that the FY2019 and FY2020 Audit reports signed on behalf of PwC did not satisfy the Relevant Requirements in relation to the matters set out in the FSDN.

PwC will also pay Executive Counsel’s costs of the investigation.

Babcock is a Public Interest Entity (PIE). It is a multinational corporation headquartered in the UK, and its shares are listed on the Main Market of the London Stock Exchange. It provides engineering services and other services (in the UK and internationally) in relation to maintaining, upgrading, operating and managing significant infrastructure and essential equipment. A number of its contracts are UK government contracts, including contracts with the Ministry of Defence.

PwC and Mr Waters have admitted serious and numerous breaches[[1] ] of Relevant Requirements in relation to the auditing of cash pooling; financing arrangements in relation to a specific overseas contract; capitalisation of certain costs on aircraft; an intangible asset; assessment of goodwill impairment; certain credit notes on aircraft; and two long-term contracts, across both audit years. Material restatements were made in the FY2021 financial statements to correct prior period errors associated with some of the breach areas.

PwC and Mr Waters failed to exercise adequate professional scepticism and to obtain sufficient appropriate audit evidence in all those areas of the audits, and to achieve fair presentation and compliance with accounting standards in five areas. In these areas, they failed adequately to challenge management as to whether management’s accounting approach was compliant with the financial reporting framework, and demonstrated an insufficient audit response to the risk of material misstatement.

With regard to Mr Waters’ position, he faced severe challenges in discharging his responsibilities as audit engagement partner, including as a consequence of being appointed to the FY2019 Audit at short notice, after the audit had commenced, and not having had the opportunity for any handover from his predecessor. The COVID-19 pandemic made the FY2020 Audit significantly more difficult.

As part of the sanctions accepted by PwC, PwC has agreed to examine and report to the FRC on aspects of its processes in respect of the change of audit engagement partners during an ongoing audit and the response to indicators of increasing audit risk during an engagement.

The Respondents’ exceptional level of cooperation during the investigation by Executive Counsel of the breaches is demonstrated by the following facts and matters:

  • PwC undertook two separate critical self-reviews of different areas of the FY2019 and FY2020 audits at the request of Executive Counsel, and disclosed their findings to Executive Counsel;
  • PwC undertook a Root Cause Analysis to identify the underlying causes of the audit failings, and disclosed their findings to Executive Counsel; and
  • Mr Waters participated fully in the self-reviews and Root Cause Analysis and fully co-operated with Executive Counsel’s investigation.

“In March 2023, the FRC announced sanctions against PwC and two audit engagement partners in relation to the FY2017 and FY2018 audits of Babcock and one of its subsidiaries.

Following a separate investigation in relation to the FY2019 and FY2020 audits, PwC and the new audit engagement partner appointed in relation to those financial years have admitted serious and numerous breaches. These included significant contraventions of the fundamental requirements to perform an audit with adequate professional scepticism and to evaluate effectively whether the financial statements complied with accounting standards and achieved fair presentation of the underlying transactions. The quality of these audits fell short of the standards expected of statutory auditors.

The FRC acknowledges that the audit engagement partner assumed his role in FY2019 in challenging circumstances. In such circumstances, however, the firm and the audit engagement partner should together have ensured that those challenges were appropriately addressed, and the audit work performed in accordance with applicable standards.”

Penrose Foss, Executive Counsel:

Read the Final Settlement Decision Notice.

 https://www.frc.org.uk/news-and-events/news/2026/07/sanctions-against-pricewaterhousecoopers-llp-and-mr-john-waters/

Thursday, July 16, 2026

The Pandora Papers.

The Pandora Papers are 11.9 million leaked documents with 2.9 terabytes of data that the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) published beginning on 3 October 2021.[1][2][3] The leak exposed the secret offshore accounts of 35 world leaders, including current and former presidents, prime ministers, and heads of state as well as more than 100 business leaders, billionaires, and celebrities. The news organizations of the ICIJ described the document leak as their most expansive exposé of financial secrecy yet, containing documents, images, emails and spreadsheets from 14 financial service companies, in nations including Panama, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates.[4][5] The size of the leak surpassed their previous release of the Panama Papers in 2016, which had 11.5 million confidential documents and 2.6 terabytes of data.[6][7][8][9][10] The ICIJ has not named its source for the documents.[11]

The ICIJ estimates that the total global amount of money held offshore (outside the country where the money was made) is between US$5.6 trillion and US$32 trillion.[3][12][13]

Disclosures

In total, 35 current and former national leaders appear in the leak, alongside 400 public officials from nearly 100 countries and more than 100 billionaires.[14] Some of the activities were legal according to the countries' respective tax laws.[11] The majority of the files were dated from 1996 to 2020, with some older documents dating back to 1970.[15] The data included 130 billionaires listed by Forbes, over 330 politicians, celebrities, members of royal families, and religious leaders.

Among those named are former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Chilean President Sebastián Piñera, former Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, Montenegrin President Milo Đukanović, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, the United Arab Emirates Prime Minister and Dubai ruler Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Gabonese President Ali Bongo Ondimba, Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati,[16] Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso, family members of former Argentine President Mauricio Macri and his spin-doctor, Ecuadorian Jaime Durán Barba,[17][18][19] and Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades.[20][21] More than 100 billionaires, 29,000 offshore accounts, 30 current and former leaders, and 336 politicians[22] were named in the first leaks on 3 October 2021...

More - 
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora_Papers

Tuesday, July 14, 2026

Social Work England's 'significant progress', undermined by 'serious and persistent weaknesses'

Social Work England has made "significant progress" in its more than six-year history, but its effectiveness has been "undermined by serious and persistent weaknesses in key areas", a review has found.

The Independent Review of Social Work Professional Regulation in England, carried out by Annie Hudson, said the regulator had weathered the "challenging circumstances" of its inception, in December 2019.

It had also "established significant expertise across its core regulatory functions", including maintaining the register and quality assuring social work education courses, added Hudson, the former chair of the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel.

Review's key criticisms of Social Work England

However, she concluded that the organisation needed to deliver "sustained improvement", particularly in relation to fitness to practise, where Hudson found that "unacceptable" delays were "weakening public protection and eroding trust".

The review also criticised "disproportionate" requirements on practitioners to submit continuing professional development (CPD) to the regulator annually and said that the regulator's communications, including with social workers involved in fitness to practise, were not good enough.

Hudson added that, as a priority, Social Work England should develop, within six months, a turnaround plan for fitness to practise, while also producing a new communications strategy and making CPD requirements less frequent and subject to greater external moderation.

Regulator accepts recommendations

In response, Social Work England accepted these and all other recommendations made by the review, though in relation to CPD, it  said it would "explore" potential changes to the annual requirements as well as mechanisms to strengthen external moderation 

Hudson also urged action from the government to simplify a "confusing" system of standards for social workers and tackle sector "misunderstanding" about Social Work England by clarifying that it was a regulator, and not an advocate or improvement agency for the profession. 

In its response to the review, the government agreed to both of these priority recommendations, as well as accepting Hudson's "central conclusion" that "sustained improvement" was needed to social work regulation in England.

However, it only accepted "in principle" another priority recommendation from Hudson, for it to legislate to tackle barriers in the fitness to practise process at the next available opportunity.

 

Hudson's probe was carried out under section 64 of the Children and Social Work Act 2017, which requires the government to commission an independent review of social work regulation to cover the first five years of Social Work England's lifespan.

Its primary purpose was to assess how well Social Work England was carrying out its statutory functions and delivering on its objectives to protect, promote and maintain the health, safety and wellbeing of the public and to promote and maintain public confidence in, and proper professional standards for, social workers in England.

Hudson was also asked to assess the education secretary's oversight and funding of Social Work England and make recommendations on how social work regulation could be improved.

What Social Work England is doing well

In her review report, Hudson listed a number of things that Social Work England was doing well. She found that:

  • The regulator's professional standards were well known and understood across the social work profession. Almost three-quarters of practitioners (74%) and a similar proportion of social work managers (71%) who responded to the review's call for evidence agreed that the standards helped them understand the knowledge, skills and behaviours they needed to do their jobs.
  • The education and training standards (ETS), and the inspection of providers against these, were "generally strong". Of education providers who responded to the call for evidence, 71% agreed that the standards supported them to prepare students to become social workers. The review also received "substantial positive feedback" from providers on Social Work England's first round of course inspections, from 2021-25.
  • The registration of social workers was "functioning effectively", and there had been improvements in Social Work England's handling of registration for international applicants.

Hudson even praised aspects of Social Work England's performance on fitness to practise. This included a 59% rise in 2025-26 in the number of decisions made at the triage stage - where the regulator decides if a concern about a social worker merits investigation - on the back of increased investment in the team. She added that there were "no concerns about fitness to practise decision making".

'Serious and unacceptable' fitness to practise delays

However, the review concluded that fitness to practise delays were "extensive, systemic and unacceptable, weakening public protection and eroding trust".

 

Hudson found that:

  • Triage decisions were taking too long: of the March 2026 open caseload, around a third had been in triage for between six and 12 months, and 22% for over a year, against Social Work England's target of completing the stage in six months.
  • Though Social Work England met its target to complete investigations within 54 weeks by the end of 2025-26, investigations were taking too long, with the process "widely perceived by registrants, employers and complainants as slow and opaque".
  • The median duration of cases that reached the hearings stage in 2025-26 was 168 weeks - just over three years - with timeliness "deteriorating more sharply here than at any other point in the process".
  • Of 82 members of the public who responded to the review's call for evidence, most expressed "low or no confidence" in the fitness to practise process, with delays the most consistently reported concern.
  • The "human impact" of delay on social workers subject to fitness to practise was "stark".

A challenging inheritance and context 

Hudson's review acknowledged the significant challenges Social Work England faced in its early days, as a result of inheriting 1,459 fitness to practise cases from the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) and becoming regulator shortly before Covid-19 struck.

As a result of pandemic restrictions, it had to stop holding in-person hearings and to redesign the fitness to practise process to allow for virtual delivery.

The regulator also received 52% more fitness to practise referrals in its first year than was anticipated. And while referral numbers stabilised subsequently, until the end of 2024, they have since risen sharply, with 38% more concerns reported in 2025-26 than in 2024-25.

In addition, Hudson noted that rules limiting the sharing of information from family court proceedings with Social Work England were leading to fitness to practise delays, particularly at the triage stage.

Criticisms of Social Work England's handling of fitness to practise

However, Hudson found that this context did "not fully explain" current levels of fitness to practise delay, and was critical of Social Work England's management of the system.

She said there had been "insufficient strategic grip across the fitness to practise system as a whole", with interventions too often appearing "reactive and ad hoc".

Social Work England told Hudson and her team that it was not sufficiently resourced - by the Department for Education (DfE) or social worker fee income - to manage the HCPC legacy cases, higher than expected volume of referrals and external challenges.

However, though the higher than expected case volumes were known about in 2020-21, Hudson found that the regulator did not, at the time, make an "end-to-end strategic assessment of business processes", to enable it to make "an iron-clad compelling case to government of its resource needs".

"In the absence of such a strategic approach, it is difficult to conclude that the organisation did all it could to resolve resourcing issues," she said.

Hudson also cited December 2022 regulatory changes that increased Social Work England's powers to require information from employers and others at the triage stage. While this helped more cases get resolved at this stage, it lengthened triage timescales "considerably", putting significant pressure on the process in the context of the recent spike in referrals.

While the regulator could not have anticipated the referral spike, Hudson criticised the fact that a review into the triage and investigations process was not initiated until May 2025.

She was also critical of the fact that nearly a year elapsed between this review starting and the regulator beginning to implement the conclusions. These include a new triage team structure, to strengthen capacity and resilience, and "a clearer pre-triage process that supports earlier and more confident decision making", the regulator has said.

In addition, while it has long been clear that most referrals come from the public and the vast majority of these are closed at triage, Social Work England has only this year started managing these cases differently to referrals from employers, said Hudson.

'Poor' communications with social workers and complainants

She also concluded that the "user experience of fitness to practise has been poor, with participants describing communication as deficient, and that processes [were] opaque".

Employers and social workers reported "long periods of inactivity followed by urgent requests for information", while practitioners "often said direct messages from Social Work England lacked empathy", with some feeling "judged or criticised".

 Complainants, meanwhile, described communication as "infrequent, impersonal and difficult to navigate", with several saying that the process was "particularly inaccessible for individuals experiencing trauma, disability or stress related to safeguarding or court proceedings".

More - 
https://www.communitycare.co.uk/content/news/social-work-englands-significant-progress-undermined-by-serious-and-persistent-weaknesses-finds-review

British special forces 'dropped prisoners from forklift for fun', Afghanistan Inquiry hears...

Sadiya Chowdhury
https://news.sky.com/story/flatplan-13563217

British troops dropped Afghan prisoners from a forklift "for fun", and a soldier who raised concerns about the killing of three farmers in a raid by special forces was called a "Taliban-loving apologist", an inquiry has heard.

Whistleblowers Monica Grenfell, a former journalist, and Christopher Green, who was part of the Army Reserve, contacted the Afghanistan Inquiry to give evidence after the chairman issued a request for information.

The inquiry is examining allegations of war crimes by UK special forces in Afghanistan between 2010 and 2013, as well as claims of a subsequent cover-up.

Both witnesses spoke behind closed doors with only redacted excerpts released on Tuesday.

'We killed the wrong people'

Mr Green, who served between January and September 2012, said he tried to raise concerns about the killing of three brothers who were farmers in the village of Rahim.

They had been shot during a deliberate detention operation which Mr Green said was described to him as having "gone wrong", forcing special forces to shoot lawfully "in self-defence".

He said his unit's intelligence team was "pretty clear that there was nothing to suggest that the sons were anything other than farmers and even less to suggest that they were Taliban commanders".

When Mr Green tried to raise concerns with a liaison officer, he said "there was a strong sense of resentment" that he was questioning what the SAS were up to.

"At some point he did call me a 'Taliban-loving apologist'," he added.

Mr Green said he asked to see footage of the killings, dubbed "gun tapes", to help him understand the incident and "engage with local nationals to try and calm the situation".

However, despite having appropriate clearance to see the video, he was denied access, the inquiry heard.

The inquiry heard the brothers' mother, Bebe Hazrata, had reportedly been paid the equivalent of £3,634 in cash by the UK government after the death of her sons, which was described as an "assistance payment".

Mr Green told inquiry chairman Lord Justice Haddon-Cave it was a "very unusual policy" that he saw as an "admission of guilt that we had killed the wrong people".

"I think I can only share my regret with you that I didn't speak sooner," he said.

 

'People had been let off the leash'

Ms Grenfell, who worked as a kitchen member and storeman with UK special forces, was told soldiers dropped prisoners from forklifts "for fun".

She told the inquiry she had met a soldier who had told her about detainees being abused: "I specifically recall him telling me that he would put prisoners on a forklift, raise it up and drive very fast so that they fell off."

She said she had "never been anywhere that was as bad as there", with a sense "people had been let off the leash somehow".

"You felt no one was really watching them (the soldiers), and the language was just... I've never known the language like it," she added.

The inquiry is also looking at whether there was an alleged cover-up of illegal activity and inadequate investigation by the Royal Military Police.

No charges were brought under Operation Northmoor, a £10m investigation set up in 2014 to examine allegations of executions by the SAS, including those of children.

A further Royal Military Police investigation, codenamed Operation Cestro, resulted in three soldiers being referred to the Service Prosecuting Authority, but none were prosecuted.

A Ministry of Defence spokesperson said: "The government is fully committed to supporting the Independent Inquiry relating to Afghanistan as it continues its work, and we are hugely grateful to all former and current defence employees who have so far given evidence.

"We also remain committed to providing the support that our special forces deserve whilst maintaining the transparency and accountability that the British people rightly expect from their armed forces.

"It's right that we allow the inquiry to complete its important work before responding in full.

 https://news.sky.com/story/flatplan-13563217

 

Wednesday, July 01, 2026

The FOS Litigation Group...

I am a CNC programmer from Birmingham. I work shifts. I cut metal for a living.

Five years ago I made the first insurance claim of my life. Subsidence at my home. Something that should have been resolved in months.

What followed changed everything I thought I knew about how this country treats ordinary people.

Fabricated documents. Forensic metadata proving three files were manufactured within 83 minutes on a single afternoon. Created from nothing. I brought the evidence. I submitted it formally. I documented everything.

The response from the Financial Ombudsman Service? A printing error.

That is what five years of evidence, hundreds of pages, and a forensic analysis gets you.


I sent a 122-page complaint to the office of Interim Chief Ombudsman James Dipple-Johnstone personally. His office told me I had reached the end of their process. The same office that sits above the Ombudsman who had issued a binding written instruction telling me to file that exact complaint.

One organisation. Two contradictory positions. Zero accountability.

I contacted over 100 law firms. I tried no win no fee, pay by the hour, every combination possible. Silence. A quick no. Sometimes both. Even claims management companies did not bother.

I stood completely alone. I kept going anyway.

Along the way I found something unexpected. Data.

A Warwick University study published November 2024 found the real consumer uphold rate at FOS is approximately 24%. FOS publishes 37%. That gap represents hundreds of thousands of people told they had been treated fairly when they had not.

On Glassdoor, 30% of 1,446 FOS staff reviews are one star. The single largest rating category. Investigators describing rushed closures driven by weekly targets, with the evidence in the file treated as secondary.

In 2018, Channel 4 Dispatches sent a reporter undercover inside FOS. Staff admitted they did not understand the products they were ruling on. One said openly they had just "slung stuff through with any old decision." Cases were pre-rehearsed for a visiting MP to make the service look competent. Hundreds of thousands of decisions may have been wrong.

FOS responded by commissioning an independent review. The reviewer found no institutional bias. He joined the FCA board the following year. He became Interim FCA Chair in 2022. He has been reappointed twice. The man who reviewed FOS now sits at the top of the regulator overseeing it.

This is architecture.

Nobody can afford to challenge it alone. That is by design. 

More - 
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/day-everything-changes-artur-nadolny-q09ue/