shal the bosses of the town do the employ themself and if yu want help start as volunteer get somewhere to register what you know then stert from ther. interviw er dem unfery just bekoz yu failed for frend to work the job.

hope mayor will be tol of all. as some poupl insted of working prerl huwer go from her thery slep at wok , stert 12nait insted of 8 but get all huor money. we cant complein dairect as victimized by some manager but we see. let fer deal at werk= 1person 1 job. why greed with job and no advantage to others. job is there but how, who where, sory but ferness.

tots eu

@ Cathy – I don’t really follow your logic. It’s hard to see how a different constitutional set up would change anything. What Dorothy has done here though is front up to the issue with parents, media etc. rather than hide behind officers.

@ James Lothian – I agree with what you say but it’s not really relevant here, surely where we have a simple operational decision about how supervised play sessions run by the council are organised. It’s nothign to do with criminalising parents – merely saying play sessions organised for children should be for children for simple reasons to do with the practicalities of running such events.

For more see Sara Bedford’s excellent blog post.

Is it me or is this just basically wrong., yes they are potential dangers out there, but are we over reacting with this legistlation and does it really so anything to help the situation. My main concern is how are our children going to turn out, fear breeds more fear, we want our children to be happy, confident and safe, are we forgetting the first two because of our fear around the third.

We have criminalised all parents, we are looking for potential bogey men or women everywhere. I have even heard people say they wouldnt help a child in trouble in case they were accused of wrong doing.

I have been a staunch liberal all my life and have always viewed them as the party with the most common sence, we are fast walking into a country I am having trouble recognising. A place where we have to be suspicious of all strangers, where the basic freedom enjoyed for over a hundred years is being rapidly erroded. Why you ask, because of fear, fear of the unknown fear of the stranger, fear of what is different.

Lose your fear and free yourselves, because if we dont, we will end up living in a state, where a man can be held without charge, where it is illegal to gather more than 25 people in one place without the permission of the police, where cameras watch our every move, where we fear strangers and foriegners. What scares me most is this is the country we all live in.

We need to find a better way, not more laws

James Lothian

@ Caron – “I think it’s a shame to exclude those children who aren’t yet ready to be left somewhere away from their parents”

By definition these children are of an age where they go to school where they are presumably left by their parents. Presumably schools don’t allow a general right for parents to attend their children’s classes. We are talking here about supervised play sessions where children are left in the care of council workers – run free of charge. The equivalent would be cubs, brownies etc. where in my experience parents were not welcome to stay with their children for the organised session (or at least no parents actually did, we never thought to insist on remaining with them).

Regarding coverage other than Iain Dale’s, I think Henry Porter’s article was culpably misleading since it’s clearly designed to imply that parents have been banned from public playgrounds rather than the supervised, enclosed facilities that these actually are.

@James Graham

To be fair the readers of Dorothy’s blog are likely to be Watford residents worried by the press coverage that they can no longer take their children to play on the local swings. She felt that it’s best if the blog contained a single, clear, unambiguous post addressing this point.

Iain Sharpe
(Watford Borough councillor, husband of Dorothy Thornhill)

You’re story gives the impression that parents have been barred from the public playgrounds. Isn’t that a bit misleading?

As I’ve already said above, the reason Iain got a personal reply – besides the size of his blogosphere readership – is that he used the story to make a cheap partisan point – ie, “this raises all sorts of questions about what it means to be a Liberal Democrat nowadays.”

The story is nothing more than media froth. The fact that Iain has not clarified his inaccurate story does him no credit at all.

Metro appears to have got confused between a public play area and a supervised playscheme environment.

I would expect to be able to go along to the play area in my local park and keep an eye on my kids while they play.

I would not expect to be able to hang around if I had booked them into a supervised playscheme. The whole point of supervised playschemes is that you leave your kids and that they are looked after by properly trained staff.

Reading between the lines I suspect that a few parents have been hanging around and undermining the efforts of the staff and that that is what has led to the tightening up of the rules.

It’s not just been misreported in the Mail? OK. The response was badly handled? Perhaps.

I don’t see what’s so hard to understand about this story. It’s not about a creche. It’s about an adventure playground. A bit like an indoor climbing centre or a sailing centre at a reservoir.

It’s a place where there are organised adventurous activities led by trained leaders. The idea is you drop your child off to an organised session and leave them to it.

Somebody please tell me – where’s the problem????