INJUSTICE! BIG TIME! SUFFOK COUNCIL!

Here's the story. I hope someone reads it.

Five months ago, the first of April, my husband and I moved to the UK. He had a job as a social worker with the Suffolk Council working with cared-for (read foster) children. Because he had been through a lot of the types of things they go through, he thought it would be good work for him, but it wasn't. It brought up all kinds of trauma from when he was a kid. Especially the older kids who were headed down a path that had led him to homelessness. And he couldn't do a thing to steer them from that path. It all got to him and he took off to the US for a day and a half.

The thing was, when he took off, we had just gotten the money for a car loan sponsored by the Council, and he took it all with him. A day and a half, he came back bringing every cent of the money, but in the meanwhile, I had been frantic and had contacted his "befriender", unfortunately, it would turn out, another Council employee.

The Council said there would have to be a meeting to determine what happened next and it was to be on the 14th of June. This is a very important date for the rest of the story.Remember that in the time between his coming back from the US and the meeting, I barely let him out of my sight, let alone out alone in the car. In the week before than meaning, we had gotten my husband counseling and all other help we could. At the meeting, they asked and he handed back the money for the car. He had arranged to take a few weeks off for stress but had decided he wanted to try to stick with the job, at least until the six-month probation period was over.

The evening before he was to go back to work, the Norfolk police turned up at our door. They took my husband down to the station. It turned out that a woman had reported seeing a man outside her home masturbating in his car and had given our license number. He was assigned a lawyer, insisted he did not do this, and, over the next few weeks, we heard several versions of what she had claimed happened, even several different dates. Eventually the date settled down to the 13th. Yes, during that time when I wasn't letting him out of my sight. So I knew for sure myself that he didn't do it.

He didn't tell the Suffolk Council. He simply assumed that she would not identify him and it would be all cleared up easily. He went back to work. Later that week, the Suffolk Council called him in and asked about his meeting with the Norfolk police and why he hadn't told them about it. He said it was embarrassing, he wanted to go back to work, and he didn't do it, so it would be all cleared up.

They said they would have to suspend him, with pay, until further news. He said he understood. A month later, the woman picked him out from an identification parade (line-up) after hesitating over two people. He reported this to the Suffolk Council, and they said there would have to be another meeting which they scheduled on August 8.

At that meeting, the Council operated as if he had been convicted. What is more, they suddenly brought forward a series of incidents that had happened in Suffolk in the week before my husband went off to the US. It had been reported that an American, wearing a suit (my husband doesn't own one) driving a silver Peugot estate car (station wagon) (ours was a silver Ford Mondeo hatchback!) had tried to get two little girls to enter his car. Now mind you, the Suffolk police had never even contacted my husband. Apparently they had contacted the Council because they had put out a bulletin for an American in a silver car and my husband's car had been reported by someone. My husband was given the time for one one incident and no other details. The Council had apparently decided that he was the guy who tried to pick up the little girls on nothing but the coincidence of a silver car and an American. On this basis, they said they would hold a serious disciplinary meeting.

That meeting was a week later. In the meanwhile, we did what we could to reconstruct where my husband had been when on the day of the incidents with the little girls, using our bank and credit card records, but since the incidents were the last of May and this was in August, there was not a lot we could do. The Suffolk Council dismissed him for gross misconduct as of August the 19th.

Fine. We thought he would get paid until then, and we could look for other jobs, and we were (are) determined to stay and clear his name. This could take a while, since the Norfolk case may not reach court until next year.

Today is Sept 1. We just found out that the Suffolk Council decided to confiscate his pay for August plus any vacation pay as partial payment of the relocation money they had provided us with in coming here. This leaves us with approximately £200 to our names in a strange country. We invested everything into this move. Our only resources are two very small retirement accounts that I have in the US, which, if I cash them out entirely, may keep us for a few months.

Because of the circumstances under which they dismissed my husband, no other social work agency will employ him until the case is cleared up. I have a Ph.D. in biochemistry and a degree in textile design, but in five months of hunting, the best I have been offered is a full-time clerical job at the local college for £5.50 an hour, though I was slowly putting together some income from my designs. I turned this down yesterday because other sources of income were looking positive.

We have no access to public funds, and because my husband was not employed with the Council for six months, he has no recourse to help from an employment lawyer that we did not pay for.

It is 12:30. We're in shock. We called the American Embassy, but they said there was no help available for us.

It heps just to write all this down, but not enough. What do we do?!!!!!