The Reasonable Adjustment That Never Arrived: A Masterclass in Institutional Gaslighting

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🎩 Formal Complaint Under the Equality Act 2010: Disability Discrimination, Procedural Nonchalance, and the Perils of Bureaucratic Improvisation

Date: 10 March 2025

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✉️ To:

The Complaints Department
Westminster Children’s Services
4 Frampton Street
London, NW8 8LF

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🖋️ Subject:

Formal Complaint – Westminster’s Reluctant Relationship with the Equality Act 2010

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🏛️ Dear Sir or Madam,

It is with a tone of weary civility — and an increasingly sceptical view of Westminster’s familiarity with statutory obligations — that I lodge this formal complaint.

Apparently, within your department, the Equality Act 2010 is viewed not as law, but as an optional garnish atop the indifferent salad of your internal processes.

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📜 I. On the Curious Absence of Reasonable Adjustments

Despite submitting multiple formal notifications, accompanied by medical documentation confirming my diagnoses of eosinophilic asthma, muscle tension dysphonia, and severe panic disorder, your department has:

• Insisted on verbal exchanges, as if wishing could override clinical fact

• Failed to provide any alternative arrangements, demonstrating a breathtaking lack of imagination and legal literacy

• Ignored advocacy requests, as though accessibility were a personal eccentricity rather than a legal right

In consequence, my health has been compromised by your procedural nonchalance, a term I use generously.

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🎭 II. Harassment, Retaliation, and Other Misguided Enthusiasms

Rather than accommodate, Westminster opted for a strategy of coercive theatre:

• Unannounced and unneeded visits masquerading as concern

• Subtle menaces wrapped in professional platitudes

• Emotional disruption inflicted upon my children — collateral damage, evidently deemed acceptable in your safeguarding parlance

• Reports engineered with selective memory, ex post facto justifications dressed up as evidence

It seems that within your institution, asserting one's rights is the surest way to become a target.

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⚖️ III. The Law: Breached, Elegantly but Consistently

Your department’s conduct constitutes breaches of:

• Section 20, Equality Act 2010 – failure to make reasonable adjustments

• Section 29, Equality Act 2010 – harassment and victimisation based on disability

I note that these breaches are not ameliorated by polished language or bureaucratic volume.

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📢 IV. What Must Now Occur (Preferably Before the Next Fiscal Year)

I hereby require:

1. A formal acknowledgment of failure to accommodate my disabilities

2. An immediate cessation of retaliatory behaviour and unwarranted interference

3. A written apology – not for consolation, but for archival purposes

4. The institution of mandatory disability rights training — taught, ideally, by someone other than yourselves

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📚 V. Should Motivation Be Needed

Should these modest remedies not be implemented, I shall escalate proceedings to:

• The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman

• The Equality and Human Rights Commission

• Legal counsel, with enthusiasm and documentation

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✒️ Final Note

Please confirm receipt of this complaint — assuming, of course, that Westminster is still capable of acknowledging something beyond its own procedural self-regard.

I await your response. Though, I confess, not with optimism.

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Yours, with a composure your services so persistently imperil,
Polly

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