The EHRC has refused to release the findings of an investigation into the huge breach of the Covid lockdown rules during the pandemic by Rebecca Hilsenrath, now chief executive of the Parliamentary Ombudsman’s Office.

The decision is in contravention of a ruling by John Edwards, the Information Commissioner, who ruled that Mark Benney , who put in the request to his office ,was entitled to answers about the finding of the report but not allowed to see it himself.

The EHRC has confirmed that a report was completed at the time Rebecca Hilsenrath, then its chief exceutive, was suspended by the EHRC as a precautionary measure. She then suddenly resigned only to get a senior job at the Parliamentary Ombudsman’s office almost immediately.

Her breach of Covid rules involved her traveling from her North London home to her country cottage in North Wales where her children also joined her -presumably also in breach of the rules – to spend their Christmas holiday together. She has four children. It was exposed in The Times newspaper.

Baroness Falkner, a crossbench peer and the chair of the EHRC, has used the same argument it deployed unsuccessfully to say that it would not answer questions about the report to protect Rebecca Hilsenrath’s privacy to refuse to publish the finding of the report.

Official Portrait of Baroness Falkner

She has decided not to appeal the decision but Mark Benney has put in his own appeal. It includes the words;” the Commissioner has erred in failing to consider whether the report and supporting documentation are capable of appropriate redaction in order to remove any special category data. Finally, it also follows that material within the report and supporting documentation that is neither personal data nor special category data is properly disclosable according to the overarching logic of the inDecision Notice.”

In my opinion this decision to hide the finding of a report about Rebecca Hilsenrath’s breach of the Covid rules is totally wrong. It may be five years ago but the lockdown meant tens of thousands of people could not move around the country, make trips like hers to celebrate Christmas and were not even able to visit relatives dying in hospitals all over the country.

In my opinion there appears to be a certain class of people who are arrogant enough to think that they are above rules that everybody else in the country is expected to obey. These people are often protected by friends in powerful positions to avoid the consequences that other less privileged people have to suffer from breaking the rules. I am not saying in this particular case this is necessarily so but the failure of public organisations to come clean about the facts in this case can only add to further speculation.

Incidently the Parliamentary Ombudsman website is still silent on any new cases and no date has been fixed yet for the new Ombudsman, Paula Sussex, to join it.

Rebecca Hilsenrath has broken her silence from the Parliamentary Ombudsman’s Office in a YouTube video on mental health put out by the Ombudsman’s Association on Leadership, Listening and Making Mistakes dealing with mental health issues. She frankly discloses that she suffered four bouts of post natal depression when she had her children and members of her family have suffered mental health problems so she is sympathetic about mentally ill people who are being badly treated by the NHS and other organisations. See the interview below.