by Sunny Hundal

The National Secular Society sent out a press release yesterday blasting the decision by the London Borough of Richmond to award a huge contract worth £89,000 to the Catholic Children’s Society to “help and support students in the borough’s schools.”

As PoliticsHome points out today, CCS recently withdrew from adoption services due to opposition to the Government’s sexual orientations regulations.

Councillor Stephen Knight, leader of Richmond’s Liberal Democrat group, said at a meeting on Tuesday that pupils who want advice on issues such as homosexuality or sexual health may be reluctant to ask a group that “requires counsellors to uphold the Catholic ethos”.

This decision beggars belief. Counselling services for young people have to address issues such as contraception, unwanted pregnancy and homophobic bullying and the appointment of a religious group to provide these services on behalf of the Council is totally inappropriate.

And who lost out? A local charity Off The Record (link fixed), which also had the backing of national counselling charity Relate, and has been providing counselling to teenagers for over 20 years.

Terry Sanderson of the NSS said:

What on earth was the council thinking about in appointing such a partisan and dogmatic organisation to provide counselling and support services? The Catholic Children’s Society went so far as to dump its adoption service because of the Government’s insistence that they consider gay couples as adopters. So what kind of reception would a gay child get if it came to one of their counsellors for advice? What sort of advice would a specifically Catholic agency with an instruction to uphold Catholic teaching tell a girl who came to them for contraceptive advice? Surely the council could have found a non-sectarian service that wouldn’t pose these sorts of problems?

Indeed.

This decision comes in the same week that a well-regarded project working with trafficked women – The Poppy Project – had to cut services after the Ministry of Justice allocated £6 million of funding to support victims of trafficking to the Salvation Army.

Poppy Project was run by the housing charity Eaves.