Newshounds and the public's right to know

My trip today to the HPC revealed some very different knowledge. The Fitness to Practice Hearing was for an Art Therapist who works with children. The practitioner is alleged to have said things about children, sex and death. This counts sufficiently as a story for the Daily Mail to send a reporter, and for two Agency journalists to turn up too. They, however, took off for Great Ormond Street as soon as the news broke about baby Hope's death after the operation to separate her from her twin sister Faith. This left the unfortunate Daily Mail hound to wait, and wait, and wait... and pass the time with me.

I learned a lot from her.

For a start, in a regular court, there is no need to hang around in the reception waiting to be called. You can just march right on in and watch what goes on while waiting for the real action to start. Second, if someone asks you to leave because a witness prefers to speak in private, you can sit tight - after all, what the witness says is not private. Third, well the third point requires a bit more background.

This morning's case alleges that the therapist tried to make jokes to a colleague about children in relation to sex and death. His case is now heard in the week where the news is all about the aftermath of the tragedy of Baby P. So, Mr D's representative moved to remove the press and the public from the gallery, and petitioned for the case to be heard in private.

So I learned another detail: first, the appeal was made to section 10, 1, a. This is written in Statutory Instrument 2003 No 1575, The Health Professions Council (Conduct and Competence Committee) (Procedure) Rules Order of Council 2003. Here it is:

"(a) the proceedings shall be held in public unless the Committee is satisfied that, in the interests of justice or for the protection of the private life of the health professional, the complainant, any person giving evidence or of any patient or client, the public should be excluded from all or part of the hearing"

What the Daily Mail reporter then wanted to know was under what power she could challenge this. For her our exclusion was an outrageous breach of civil liberties, and might be a contravention of the Human Rights Act.

I stuck close by as she refused to be ushered back to the dullness of the reception, and while she phoned around to see if she could muscle her way back into the room,I noticed the coming and going in the corridor. Three middle aged men in grey walked by and back again, two in their outdoor macs. The indoor man was pointing out the hearing in this room, and the other one in that, and seemed to boast that they always had two or three going on at the same time. As he brought them back down the corridor he said, 'we shall have much more in a few months, maybe 20 or so at the same time, when the psychologists come onto our books. They tend to have better insurance, so the cases will go on for longer'. Never had the place felt more like a factory where registrants are dumped by colleagues and bosses into the mill for the pleasure of the legal profession and the administrators.

The HPC staff don't get involved at all in the nasty business. It is central part of the process that a false objectivity is constructed, and it is here that we can see most clearly the mechanism for producing proliferating unintended unheeded consequences. The 'court gimp' as the hack called him, just trawls through paperwork to collect complaints, then organises the paperwork and room bookings. An IPC is convened (independence practitioners) and it is up to them to gather evidence and find witnesses. The administrator can shrug, and smile, and go home with a clear conscience. These details are spelled out in the Health Professions Order 2001, the legal instrument passed by an elite group, the Privy Council, late in the year 2001.

The journalist was on a 'steep learning curve' trying to figure out her place in the law at the HPC. I am giving myself - and you, if you are there - a more gentle, longer slope to get the hang of the thing, for there is a twist in the logic of it which is pernicious, and which I believe is already producing unitended consequences of a kind that must be stopped.

One more thing: the law that this process is set up on is no ordinary kind of law. It is apparently called 'regulatory law' and has it's own kind of logic.

Bit by bit, in this ordinary way, I am trying to learn and to pass on the peculiar nature of the thing that is taking over as 'task master' for an extraordinary and diverse range of practitioners. I believe it to be the public's duty to join in. Especially as all this is done in our name.