A Mandate Is Not an Answer
PSHEbrighton, founded by the Archbishop of Selsey with parents and professionals concerned about safeguarding in the city, asked every Goldsmid candidate what they would do after the WellBN investigation. Only one replied. The election has conferred office. It has not answered how Brighton failed its children or why its political class remains so reluctant to discuss it.
Before the Goldsmid by-election, PSHEbrighton wrote to all six candidates. The group asked whether they would uphold single-sex provision in schools, involve parents in decisions about social transition, review council guidance against current law, strengthen safeguarding oversight and meet families who had raised concerns.
Only one candidate, Luke Willmoth of Reform UK, replied.¹
That does not make Mr Willmoth right about everything, nor does it amount to an endorsement of his party. PSHEbrighton is non-party-political. The significance lies elsewhere. Six people sought public office after an official investigation had established grave failures involving children in their own city. Five did not engage with the questions.
One of those five has now been elected.
Nadia Barton Ahmad won the seat for the Green Party with 2,037 votes, defeating Labour’s Philip Berman by 680. In her victory statement, she promised to work tirelessly to ensure that residents’ “voices are heard and concerns are acted upon”.²
That promise now has an obvious first test.
The questions sent by PSHEbrighton were not based upon speculation, social-media rumour or partisan hostility. They followed an independent NHS patient-safety investigation into prescribing at WellBN, a Brighton and Hove GP practice.
The investigators concluded that potential harm had been caused to all 78 children and young people within the investigation’s scope. The clinical approach, including the oversight exercised by the practice partners, fell “far short of what could be considered safe or appropriate”. The care was not delivered through a commissioned NHS pathway, and none of the clinicians examined was professionally competent to initiate or assume responsibility for the prescribing without specialist oversight or support.³
Necessary physical tests were often not carried out. There was insufficient involvement from paediatric endocrinologists, specialist gender clinicians, paediatricians, mental-health professionals and fertility specialists. Investigators also identified failures in clinical governance, record-keeping and informed consent.³
The consequences are not merely historical. WellBN has been instructed not to resume specialist gender care for children, not to prescribe hormonal medications to under-eighteens outside NHS policy, and to submit to exceptional monitoring of its prescribing. Current and former clinicians have been referred to professional regulators or NHS professional-standards procedures. The Care Quality Commission has suspended the practice’s rating while conducting its own assessment.³
These findings altered the terms of the local debate. Parents who had been accused of exaggerating could point to an official investigation. Questions once dismissed as ideological had become questions of documented patient safety. Concerns about assessment, competence, consent and medical oversight were no longer hypothetical.
This was the moment for Brighton’s political leaders to demonstrate that lessons had been learned.
Instead, five candidates declined even to explain their position.
No candidate was required to accept PSHEbrighton’s analysis. They could have defended the council, disputed the relationship between education and medicine, questioned the wording of the correspondence or proposed a different remedy. Public accountability does not require agreement. It requires an answer.
Their silence matters because it belongs to a longer pattern. Parents, clinicians and residents have repeatedly tried to raise concerns about social transition, school policy, parental involvement and the treatment of children experiencing gender-related distress. Too often, the institutional response has been to manage the complainants rather than examine the complaint.
This is how safeguarding systems fail. The failure rarely begins with an explicit decision to harm a child. It begins when an institution becomes too certain of its own moral position to remain curious about contrary evidence.
Professional curiosity is the discipline of asking what else might be happening. It tests the preferred explanation, listens to those who disturb the consensus and considers the damage that may follow if the institution is wrong. It is especially important when children present with autism, mental-health difficulties, family distress, trauma or uncertainty about their developing sexuality.
The affirmation model weakened that discipline. A child’s declared identity was too often treated as the conclusion of an assessment rather than the beginning of one. Caution could be characterised as rejection. Parental concern could be interpreted as prejudice. Professionals who questioned the prevailing approach risked being accused of causing the very distress they were trying to understand.
Once that moral framework took hold, the ordinary safeguards became harder to apply. The prescribed response had already been declared compassionate. Any challenge to it could therefore be presented as cruelty.
WellBN has shown the danger of allowing a contested clinical model to acquire moral immunity from scrutiny.
Brighton and Hove City Council’s Trans Inclusion Schools Toolkit forms part of the same history. The latest version was approved in January 2025. It contains welcome cautions: it acknowledges that gender exploration may change over time, recommends a case-by-case approach, refers to the Cass Review and states that schools should not ordinarily support social transition without involving parents.⁴
Yet it also permits schools to proceed without parental involvement where senior staff decide there are “sound reasons” for doing so. It advises schools to seek further professional guidance where parents oppose social transition and suggests that requiring a male pupil identifying as a girl to use boys’ toilets might amount to prima facie indirect discrimination.⁴
The point is not that the toolkit caused the WellBN prescribing failures. No official investigation has established such a connection. Schools did not issue the prescriptions, and councillors did not make the clinical decisions condemned by the NHS.
The connection is one of institutional culture.
Schools shape the language through which children understand distress. They influence whether uncertainty is explored or prematurely resolved, whether parents are treated as indispensable safeguarding partners or potential impediments, and whether biological sex is recognised as a material reality or subordinated to identity.
Medical and educational policy cannot therefore be sealed into separate administrative compartments. A city should ask whether assumptions promoted in schools made one explanation for adolescent distress appear uniquely legitimate. It should examine whether social transition created momentum towards clinical intervention, whether professionals felt free to question the prevailing model and whether parents encountered a system more ready to classify their concerns than hear them.
That is not an allegation of a proven conveyor belt from classroom to clinic. It is a safeguarding question. After WellBN, refusing to ask it would be negligent.
The council has another reason to review its position. The legal and regulatory setting has changed since the toolkit was approved. The Supreme Court has confirmed that the terms “sex”, “man” and “woman” in the Equality Act 2010 refer to biological sex. The Department for Education has proposed placing guidance on gender-questioning children within the statutory safeguarding framework, with a careful approach to social transition and parental involvement. The Equality and Human Rights Commission is consulting on revised technical guidance for schools.⁵
The toolkit itself promises continuing review in response to new evidence, case law and best practice.⁴ An open reconsideration would therefore not constitute surrender to campaigners. It would fulfil the council’s own stated commitment.
The Goldsmid candidates were asked whether they would support such scrutiny. Five gave no answer.
Councillor Barton Ahmad is not responsible for the clinical failures at WellBN. She is newly elected and should be judged by what she now does. Her democratic victory deserves respect.
It should not be burdened with a meaning it cannot carry. Her 2,037 votes cannot retrospectively answer correspondence that her campaign left untouched. Residents voted for many reasons: housing, public services, green spaces, the cost of living, national politics or party allegiance. Most will never have seen PSHEbrighton’s questions. Almost two-thirds of the electorate did not vote.²
A mandate confers the authority to serve. It does not certify that every unanswered question has been approved by the public.
The new councillor can now demonstrate that her promise to listen was more than election-night language. She can answer the questions. She can meet the parents and professionals involved. She can support a transparent review of the council toolkit and ask what the city’s educational, health and safeguarding institutions knew, when they knew it and how they responded.
The obligation does not rest upon her alone. Labour remains responsible for the administration of Brighton and Hove City Council. Candidates from Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats and the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition also failed to reply. The unwillingness to engage crossed party lines. Accountability must do the same.
Nor should this become a search for convenient villains. Most of those involved will have believed that they were acting compassionately. But safeguarding exists precisely because good intentions are not enough. Institutions can conform, professionals can be mistaken and fashionable orthodoxies can place vulnerable people at risk.
Children experiencing distress require kindness, patience and protection from bullying. They also require evidence, comprehensive assessment, honest recognition of biological reality and the involvement of those who bear primary responsibility for their welfare. Compassion is not proved by removing those safeguards.
PSHEbrighton gave every candidate an opportunity to show that Brighton had understood this lesson. Five declined to take it.
Goldsmid has chosen its councillor. Brighton has still not explained how children came to receive care the NHS found unsafe and inappropriate, why parents raising warnings were so often kept at a distance, or whether assumptions embedded in local school policy helped to make serious scrutiny more difficult.
The ballot box can confer office. It cannot erase evidence, discharge a council’s safeguarding duties or turn silence into an answer.
Councillor Barton Ahmad has promised that residents’ voices will be heard and their concerns acted upon. She should begin with those Brighton’s institutions have found easiest not to hear.
¹ PSHEbrighton, “PSHEbrighton Statement on the Goldsmid By-Election,” 25 June 2026. The statement records that all six candidates were approached and that Luke Willmoth was the only candidate to respond. The accompanying correspondence asked about single-sex facilities, parental involvement in social transition, review of local authority guidance, safeguarding oversight and engagement with parents and carers.
² Brighton & Hove City Council, “Results of the Goldsmid By-election,” 26 June 2026; Frank le Duc, “Greens Win By-election in Hove,” Brighton and Hove News, 26 June 2026. Nadia Barton Ahmad received 2,037 votes, Philip Berman 1,357, Luke Willmoth 304, Kim Leyland-Walker 214, Louis Bird 210 and Glenn Kelly 31. A total of 4,156 votes were cast from an electorate of 11,596, giving a turnout of 35.84 per cent.
³ NHS Surrey and Sussex Integrated Care Board, “Independent Patient Safety Investigation into Prescribing Practices at WellBN GP Practice in Brighton and Hove,” June 2026, especially “Investigation Outcome,” “Key Findings” and “Next Steps.”
⁴ Brighton & Hove City Council, Trans Inclusion Schools Toolkit 2024, Version 5, agreed by Cabinet in January 2025, especially §§1.1–1.3, 3.1–3.3, 4.1–4.3 and Appendix 2.
⁵ For Women Scotland Ltd v Scottish Ministers [2025] UKSC 16; Department for Education, “Including Guidance on Children Who Are Questioning Their Gender in ‘Keeping Children Safe in Education’,” 12 February 2026; Equality and Human Rights Commission, “Schools in England Technical Guidance Consultation,” opened 10 June 2026.
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