by Dia Chakravarty, Telegraph
Councils have reportedly been wasting taxpayers’ money ‘on training from activist organisations with views far beyond the mainstream’
A new report by Policy Exchange has revealed the scale of access which activist groups such as Mermaid have had to vulnerable children in the care of the state. In the last 48 months, 17 councils had been members of a Stonewall scheme, while 12 had paid activist groups “to provide training”.
The devastating report – which is rightly sympathetic to the extremely difficult task which individual careworkers have in striking the right balance in responding to the needs of vulnerable youth – concludes that the care system, which “in many places, [is] ideologically captured” is “failing gender questioning children”.
In 2023-24 Staffordshire County Council spent £3,075 on gender-related training by the activist organisation Mermaids. The amount is small, but the impact of exposing some of the most vulnerable children to a group such as Mermaid, which by December 2022 was already the subject of a statutory inquiry, is enormous, raising serious concerns around safeguarding in our local councils.