Surely Mridul Wadhwa has to go now? Report into ERCC out.

[GargoylesofBeelzebub]

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13842189/Edinburgh-Crisis-Centre-designed-protect-women-suffered-sexual-violence-condemned-failing-damning-report.html

Pretty scathing. Wadhwa cannot stay surely?

Indeed it goes further:

0 – Core standard
The core standard requires that the organisation’s primary or major purpose is to
^deliver services to women and girls who has experienced any form of sexual violence at any time in their lives. It also requires organisations to provide and protect women only spaces.

^
There is no mention of dedicated spaces/times for women and girls in the ERCC
Strategy 2023-28 nor in ‘who we support and our services’ on the website. The website at the date of the review gave information on women only times in FAQs which were added to the website after the Tribunal case.

^This contrasts with much clearer information about ERCC’s other services.

^
The reviewer asked for clarification of what ‘women only’ services are available from
ERCC (see in-person meetings at ERCC’s premises and video meeting 02 July 2024 for more information). A document was provided which set out the iterations of ERCC’s women only services (see video meeting 02 July 2024 and follow up for a summary). However, this still did not set out the definition of woman/female being used by ERCC. The reviewer asked for the centre’s working definition (see questions for the COO 02.08.24).

From the report:

Putting women in the position of having to discuss whether the service they receive will be provided by someone who was born and continues to identify as female has caused damage and does not amount to the provision of protected ‘women only’ spaces. Therefore, requiring women to specify that they want a service delivered by a biological woman/female amounts to a core failure to deliver services to NSS standards under both the 2019 and 2024 versions.

While welcome, some of the criticisms are spectacularly hypocritical of RCS.
I don't believe they didn't know what the "women-only" group policy was at ERCC at the time.

Reviewer: What definition of woman/female is used by ERCC?

Answer: ERCC supports survivors of all genders from 12 years of age. We accept
^self id for referrals and if the referral is appropriate for one of our services we offer the initial meeting. During the initial meeting we create a safe environment to explore further information about the survivor to ascertain how best we can support them. The IM [information meeting] form has the questions that are asked.

^
If we cannot support someone perhaps due to age or they are outwith our local
authority area we signpost them.
^
^
Reviewer: Please can I have TB minutes endorsing the policy on not advertising
^women only services and only providing them on request (formulated in an email exchange HOS, COO SSW September 2022 (see video meeting 02 July 2024 and follow up for a summary).

^
Answer: This was not a policy change only a change in operational practice. To
clarify. ERCC didn’t stop offering women only times. In review there was feedback that there was very little demand of the women only times. The change in operational practice was aimed to ensure that we can offer person centered and individualised spaces for any survivor who requested women only times so they were not adversely impacted by fixed times that would not be suitable for them.

This was to offer flexibility around the need of the survivors. The worker doing the
IM [information meeting] would have explored with service user about preference for women only time and their availability.

If anybody has the will, please, PLEASE try and update or suggest there are updates to this page

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mridul_Wadhwa

It is written entirely by gender affirming activists, you would think the sun shone out of his arse the way they talk about him as a victim, as a crusader

The response states that there was very little demand for the women only times. This
^could have been for a range of factors which do not seem to have been explored before such an important decision was taken. The email correspondence shows that from 01 October 2022 until at least February 2024, there were no protected women only spaces available through ERCC unless they were specifically requested.

^
Putting women in the position of having to discuss whether the service they receive
^will be provided by someone who was born and continues to identify as female has caused damage and does not amount to the provision of protected ‘women only’
spaces. Therefore, requiring women to specify that they want a service delivered by a biological woman/female amounts to a core failure to deliver services to NSS standards under both the 2019 and 2024 versions.

^
The reviewer asked the Trustees at a meeting on 07.08.24 whether they had been
^asked to approve this policy. The Trustees could not remember being asked to do so. They had checked the meeting minutes and could not find any record of such a
decision. The response from the senior management team (SMT) provided above shows that they were not informed or requested to decide this very important matter.

^
The SMT was aware that issues of sex and gender are strongly contested and that
^decisions made would be likely to have an impact within ERCC and externally.
^

Therefore, a decision to accept self-ID is a matter of policy and not solely an operational decision. In addition, the issues have a direct bearing on whether the
NSS are being met. It should properly have been referred to the Trustee Board.

Failure to refer this important issue to the Trustee Board was a serious failure of
governance by senior management, responsibility for which lies with the CEO.

Fairly unequivocal and unambiguous there.

1 – Strong leadership
1.1 Strategic plan, values and professional frameworks

The ERCC Strategy 2023-28 is a high level document which does not give survivors
first priority. The first priority mentioned is to ‘Invest in our people, culture and systems’. It mentions women once in the context of the SIA project (p.4).

This is surprising given the memorandum and articles of the organisation and the data on rape and sexual assault in Scotland. Police Scotland recorded 14,602 incidents of sexual crime in 2022-23. 2,529 of these concerned rape or attempted rape and 5,282 were sexual assault. 94% of rape or attempted rape victims were female and 86% of sexual assault victims were female.

ERCC’s values as stated in its strategy are: loving, empowering, inclusive,
accountable, brave are not fully consistent with NSS’ values: survivor-centred,

trauma-informed, gender-informed, empowerment-orientated, embodying a culture of
belief, actively anti-racist, and employing an intersectional feminist approach.

‘Loving’ and ‘brave’ are not listed in RCS Best Practice Model 2021. These appear
both inappropriate and to raise boundary issues when used in the context of survivors of gender-based violence. The reviewer was informed that these values had been developed through work with survivors. However, the evidence provided did not entirely support this.

The Tribunal judgment demonstrates that the CEO did not treat the survivor, whose
email correspondence was quoted in the judgment, according to the ERCC’s values.

The judgment also found that the management investigation in respect of RA had the
effect of creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating and offensive environment for her and she was discriminated against because of her gender critical beliefs.

Unforgiveable.

Does ERCC help the FWS supreme court case? It’s a compelling real world example of why fuzzy boundaries and definitions are a problem.

Exactly my thought. They were well aware of it.

Is this them throwing Wadhwa under the bus instead of addressing their own failings?

The PHW (and all the committees) were in existence prior to the current Trustee
Board. It was suspended in March 2024 as there were too few trustees to operate sub-committees effectively so all business was dealt with by the main Board.

Basic governance procedures were poor. Trustees had concerns about the quality of
trustee board papers and tried to support and direct improvements. However, theCEO did not implement the Trustees’ requests.

There was no annual/impact report available to external stakeholders beyond the
annual report and accounts.

The reviewer was surprised to note that a ‘Whole Service Day’ event had been
scheduled for 08.05.24 from 9.00 - 4.30 and a Trustee Board meeting scheduled for the same day. It seemed likely that people involved in the former would be tired and not at their best by the time of the Trustee Board meeting and it would have been better not to schedule two such important events for the same day.

There were no training plans or overall training plan for trustees. Records were
provided for two Trustees. The type and amount of training was very different for the two individuals. The Trustees had identified this as an area of concern which they wished to address (see evidence provided by the Convener/Chair of the Trustee Board for more information). The board have sourced support through Inspiring Scotland's Specialist Volunteer Network to help them to conduct a new skills audit and create a training and development plan for the Trustees. They will also assist the board to source Safeguarding, Sexual Violence and Feminist Governance training.

See evidence provided by the Trustee Board 07.08.24.

Everyone knows, surely, that a "woman" is a person of either sex - differentiated from a "man" (who is also a person of either sex) by

Sorry, my notes seem to end there. Still! Perfectly clear.

Senior managers stated that service users and survivors had influenced ERCC’s
strategy. However, the evidence provided did not entirely support this. See 1.1 Strategic plan, values and professional frameworks.

The Service User Involvement Policy dated 25 May 2016 (marked as draft) was
provided on 07.08.24. Point 7 refers to friends and family receiving services from ERCC being asked to provide feedback on their experiences. Issues of confidentiality or conflict of interest were not raised within the policy. Although other policies were cited as relevant, this could cause confusion and mean these important issues were overlooked.

AND

There was no Employee handbook covering all relevant policies and procedures.

The induction checklist included a reference to a number of important policies and
procedures. The reviewer was informed at a late stage of the review that there was a folder named ‘1 Strategy and Governance’ where all policies are kept and is available to staff members.

AND

It is generally noted that sickness rates have risen since the pandemic. However,
higher sickness rates are still used as an indicator of problems with the working environment. Sickness rates at ERCC were acknowledged to be higher than average.

It appeared to the reviewer that whilst some members of staff at ERCC would feel
comfortable with the culture generated by the CEO’s gender identity/gender affirmative activist approach, it was likely that any other members of staff with more gender critical views would not be, and would be unlikely to speak up after the treatment received by RA.

The Chartered Institute of Personnel Development (CIPD), states on its website that:
‘ Employers have a responsibility to protect the rights of all individuals, establish and communicate standards of professional behaviour and effectively manage incidents of conflict.’ The Tribunal judgment showed that there were serious instances when ERCC’s CEO failed to model or communicate professional standards of behaviour.

For example, in communicating with other members of staff her view that RA’s belief
was hateful and that by holding it RA was a bigot and a transphobe
. Also stating ata meeting at Edinburgh University that she saw firing people as a way of ensuring the staff in the organisation fully complied with her definition of trans inclusion, which the Tribunal found amounted to harassment. These instances caused damage to individuals and to the reputation of the organisation.

The minutes of the Trustee Board meeting on 08.05.24 recorded a discussion
between Trustee Board members and SMT members which revealed a difference of approach on recruitment and that the SMT had to be reminded in the strongest terms
of the need to follow ERCC’s policy. See Evidence provided by the Convener/Chair of the Trustee Board for more information.

Towards the end of the review, the reviewer was informed that the COO had been
promoted into the role at a time of crisis, had been required to carry out her previous role for the first two to three months of the new role, and was dealing with both a Tribunal and a redundancy process. This impacted her ability to assimilate information about what would be the general duties of the COO and was a huge burden. This indicates that she was not provided with an appropriate induction, support or supervision. It appears that the Trustees were not aware of this.

It should be noted that there has been significant change in the composition of the
Trustee Board since year ending 31.03.21 (see Timeline of events relevant to ERCCfor more details). None of the trustees at that date are still on the board. Six new
members joined the board in April 2021, of which only one remains. Integrating six new members at one time would be challenging for most boards, doing so during Covid lockdowns would increase that challenge. There were four resignations during
2021 and six resignations during 2022. The board currently has five members, which is smaller than it has been historically and means that Trustees (particularly the Convener/Chair) are putting in considerable personal time to the organisation alongside their paid work and other responsibilities.

The current Trustees have made it very clear that they are committed to bringing
about significant change in the organisation and have been making efforts to do so.

For example, the Trustees instructed the SMT to produce a Code of Conduct in April
2024; but implementation was not progressed by the CEO in a timely manner.

So does that mean heads are going to roll now, starting with, but not finishing with his?

The data protection policy did not clearly state who leads on data protection. This
allows for the possibility of misunderstanding about which of the three staff named has responsibility for which element. However, in the absence of clarity, the overall responsibility would lie with the CEO:

‘The Chief Executive Officer, Chief Operating Officer and Office Manager are
responsible for:

• Ensuring all personal data is controlled in compliance with the Data Protection
Act 1998;

• All members of staff and volunteers have access to a copy of this policy
(located on the X drive.)
• Making sure that all workers understand the policy and procedure through
consultation and input at team meetings;

• Identifying any training requirements arising from the Data Protection Policy;
• Managing ‘subject access’ appropriately;
• Ensuring the Information Commissioner entry is up-to-date and accurate
• Ensuring that any disclosures of information are made as set out in this policy.
• The Chief Executive Officer takes day to day responsibility for processing data.’

ERCC’s data protection policy had not been updated since 2017 (although it was
marked with a review date of January 2024). It was marked that contacts had been updated in January 2024, it still referred to the Data Protection Act 1998 and had not been updated in line with GDPR / UK GDPR.

The Data Retention and Control policy was within the data protection policy supplied.

However, it concerned only employee data. A comprehensive review of data held
with retention periods was included as a schedule to a data processor agreement signed by the previous CEO in 2018 but current senior management were apparently unaware of this.

Even dropping a note on the "talk" page would be enough...

There's other stuff in there but I will post one final thing which I think may be relevant:

Also during the meeting on 21 June 2024, the COO and HOS explained the
^pressures on ERCC resulting from a proposed significant funding reduction by the Scottish Government, which had required ERCC to start a redundancy process.

^
Happily the funding cuts had not been implemented; but the process had taken a
great deal of management time and caused stress to staff. In addition, ERCC had been involved in the tribunal case, which had also required management time and was stressful.

So on leave since the state of the redundancy process by the look of it.

This looks like you could legitimately fire without needing to pay out redundancy...

While it would be great to see Wadhwa go, it will be intensely frustrating if they do simply throw him under the bus, while all those responsible for this debacle, who installed him as the face of transactivism within the rape crisis sector, get to carry on with their cruel attitudes to women.

It's definitely throwing Wadhwa under the bus.

However it looks like Trustees may have tried to implement things but were Stonewalled (sic) by Wadhwa on several occasions and there is evidence for this.

I suspect damage limitation and trying to avoid an expensive redundancy package here to protect the organisation itself though is probably the bigger motivator.

RCS are being very hypocritical here, they knew what was going on with ERCC and did nothing about it. So pretending this is all a big surprise to them is sickening.

On the plus side, this report is pretty unequivocal and explicit in single sex being non negotiable and that survivors gender critical feelings can not be pushed back on.

Agree. They were also full on TWAW and shut the fuck up bigots to people raising objections.

A damning report
If Wadhwa does leave, let us hope that will be assisted to reframe his trauma poor thing.

Someone at CEO level will have severance agreements written into their contract. They don't get redundancy in the same way the plebs do.

Mridul is likely to get a payout despite how damning this report has been.

So: a revolting human being and also shit at his job.