FEAR of sending out the wrong message stopped a charity from being invited to speak to Oxfordshire councillors.

At the county council's full meeting last Tuesday (July 14), independent Didcot councillor Neville Harris proposed that the authority should congratulate a charity called Children Heard and Seen for receiving a Queen's Award for Voluntary Service in 2019.

Children Seen and Heard is an Oxfordshire-based charity that works with the children of prisoners to prevent them from following their parents into a life of crime.

According to the Ministry of Justice 65 per cent of boys with a convicted parent go on to offend themselves.

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Mr Harris also suggested the council should invite the charity to speak at one of its committees with the aim of learning from its work and how it supports children.

He told his fellow councillors that Oxfordshire could 'plant a seed' for preventing crime across the UK.

Mr Harris described the children of prisoners as a 'very vulnerable group without protection under the law'.

He said: “This is a motion which enables us to show we care about this very vulnerable section of young people in society.”

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Neville Harris

While all other councillors who discussed the charity were full of praise for its work, with some having said they had helped families who had been supported by Children Seen and Heard, there was discomfort at the idea of inviting any charity to speak at a council scrutiny committee.

Conservative councillor Steve Harrod said: “I do foresee a danger in supporting this motion that it would set a dangerous precedent.”

Mr Harrod asked whether other charities might also ask for the council’s time to make presentations about their work and said the demand on committees could become completely unmanageable if this happened.

Labour opposition leader Liz Brighouse, said she would be uncomfortable asking Children Heard and Seen to speak in front of the committee she leads, performance scrutiny, as there would be an obligation to scrutinise its work.

She said: “Rather than being inundated with charities I think we would rather send a message out to charities that great, big sister Oxfordshire wants to call you in and scrutinise what you are doing. That is not the message we want to send out to charities doing really, really good work.”

The council’s Lib Dem group backed Mr Harris’ motion.

Tim Bearder, the Lib Dem councillor for Wheatley, said inviting the charity to speak would be a way to listen and learn.

READ AGAIN about the work of Children Seen and Heard here

He said: “We can, on occasion and with the support of a councillor like Neville, reach out to the wider community and respect it.”

But the motion to invite the charity to speak was voted down.

Mr Harris said he had only hoped that an ‘appropriate’ committee might be able to listen to the work of Children Seen and Heard, and that it did not need to be scrutinised.

Children Seen and Heard was set up by former youth rehabilitation worker Sarah Burrows from her kitchen table, and has helped more than 500 children over the last six years.

The Queen’s Award for Voluntary Services, seen as the MBE for charities and volunteer groups, was presented to the charity last year.