After two years of trying to deal with Bristol City Council in a legal capacity regarding senior officers spying on Send families in 2021, a two-year process which they have frustrated at every single possibility, it has came to the point in which to give up and publish what happened instead.

Bristol City Council was been given every opportunity to deal with the issue in a fair way. I have:

• Complained to scrutiny commissions, Audit and Full Council
• I supported a motion by councillors calling for an independent investigation into the surveillance. That has not been carried out.
• The Monitoring Officer Tim O’Gara, refused to allow my complaint against Marvin Rees for failing to allow an independent investigation.
• Bristol City Council spent two years frustrating the legal action I took regarding their surveillance.
• Has refused to be a fair party in legal action

Bristol City Council maintains:

• That it collected evidence on one working day.
• Posts were collated on just two occasions.
• That posts were flagged on an ad hoc basis by staff ‘including’ when the council was ‘tagged’ in posts.

Why is an independent investigation urgently needed?

• There is nothing in place to protect Bristolians from being surveilled covertly.
• There is nothing to stop social workers from removing provision based on their personal feelings.
• That Bristol City Council is allowing the message to persist that it is fine to covertly surveil residents both in person and online.
• That anyone who works in any capacity with Bristol City Council, whether by a charity, an organisation or an employee, is giving up their right to privacy.

An independent investigation was finally voted through at Children and Young People Scrutiny Commission in July 2025.

For the purpose of the following pages, I have removed – where possible – posts made with the tagging of Bristol City Council in them.

The following pages will show that covert surveillance was systemic. Took place over months and involved a large number of council officers – even at director level.

Who Am I?
My name is Jen Smith. I live in Bristol and have Disabled children. Both have had an incredibly difficult time under the city’s failure to get to grips with the 2014 SEN reforms. I have Tweeted about this failure and written articles. I have also been invited to comment for other people’s articles.

I also spend time reading through council documents and making statements and asking questions in public forum.

In 2018, I joined Bristol Parent Carers to co-run a support group in south Bristol. In January 2022, I was voted in as vice chair.

Parent Carer Forums work in co-production with local authorities and health service to improve service delivery.

Bristol City Council did not want either me or the chair voted in to be part of the Bristol Parent Carer Forum.

What they did was to surveil online and in person what was being said about the council.

I was one of the two Send parents Bristol City Council spied on, collated data and spied on in person.

The views on this site are mine alone and do not reflect the views of any other individual, organisation or Bristol Parent Carer Forum.

All content supplied by Jen Smith as an individual Bristol resident