Fears that drove me out of mother’s rights movement
...by the National Childbirth Trust’s furious former president who claims it’s betraying its core values
LIKE many women, Seána Talbot valued the support the National Childbirth Trust offered. So much so, that after the charity guided her through three pregnancies, she remained devoted to the NCT as a volunteer.
As her children grew older she worked her way from a grassroots campaigner to the upper echelons of the NCT, becoming a trustee in 2009 and its president in 2015. Popular and passionate, she used her position to fight tirelessly for mothers’ rights.
Until this month, that is, when, after 25 years spent championing the charity, she abruptly resigned with a statement every bit as furious as her support had hitherto been unflinching.
Seána claimed there was a ‘profound lack of trust’ within the organisation and ‘a culture of fear’ that she had experienced where people were ‘frightened to speak up’. She accused the NCT of blithely neglecting the charity’s core values of childbirth and breastfeeding, and of failing to listen to the grassroots members, to whom it owed its success.
Speaking exclusively from the kitchen of her home near Belfast, Seána says: ‘To resign was a huge decision. I was heartbroken when I did it.’
So what on earth is going on at the NCT? Certainly Seána, 56, gives the impression of a charity at war, and other NCT members — past and present — seem to agree something is wrong.
Issues range from rage at the promotion of bottle-feeding at the expense of breastfeeding, until now one of the organisation’s core priorities, and the collapse of the charity’s membership from 100,000 members to under 50,000 members in just three years.
MOST damaging of all, however, appears the charity’s botched handling of a tragedy four years ago that has left irreparable scars.
And at the centre of all these alleged crises is one reportedly charming but ruthless man; the charity’s first male chief executive, Nick Wilkie.
In April 2015, just days after Nick’s appointment was announced, seven-week-old Grace Roseman was found dead in a Bednest cot at her home in Haywards Heath, West Sussex. The cot had been co-branded with the NCT, but it turned out to have a fatal design flaw — the side could be folded partially down — and Grace died after her head got stuck over the side of the cot, stopby ping her breathing.
Desperate to avoid damage to its reputation from the tragic death, the NCT hired the now defunct PR firm Bell Pottinger in 2016 for advice on how to handle the situation.
In a document seen by the Mail, Bell Pottinger — disgraced in 2017 after its campaign exploiting racial animosity in South Africa to benefit a client emerged — advised Cambridge-educated Wilkie, 43, to get rid of Seána and Bryan Macpherson, 46, a married father of four from the Outer Hebrides who became an NCT trustee in 2009.
It also recommended the removal of two other trustees who had been on the board in 2012 when the decision was made by the NCT’s trading arm to co-brand with Bednest.
Despite acknowledging these Trustees had no responsibility whatsoever for the tragedy, the PR company wrote: ‘Risk of serious harm to NCT’s reputation would be significantly reduced if Mr Wilkie were able to give evidence that, as part of an on-going charitable governance review, the
trustees that were in place at the time the co-branding decision was taken have stepped aside.’
No matter that the cot had been declared safe by the Furniture Industry Research Association before the NCT made the decision to co-brand, that an inquest would later declare Grace’s death an accident or that the NCT accepted their trustees weren’t at fault.
Wilkie forced them to quit in December 2016, nonetheless — or ‘bullied’ them out, as Seána, who has combined her work for the NCT with jobs at the Department of Health and NHS, where she was a commissioning manager responsible for a budget of over £100m a year, puts it.
She said they received an email from Wilkie, informing them he would remove their NCT membership if their resignations were not received by the following day.
Two trustees left without a fuss while Seána and Bryan clung on for a month until, Seána says, ‘we couldn’t take the pressure any more’. She adds: ‘I experienced anxiety, depression and insomnia. I lost my self- confidence. I’m used to carrying stress, but this was way beyond anything reasonable.’ Her despair was compounded by confusion: ‘We hadn’t done anything wrong. It was so illogical.’
This week, the NCT press officer emailed me their ‘only’ comment on the tragedy, which doesn’t mention the trustees at all: ‘Both NCT and Bednest as organisations unreservedly apologise for their respective parts in the tragic death of Grace Roseman and have reached a settlement on a confidential basis with the Roseman family.
‘NCT and Bednest would like to make it clear that no blame should be attached to any member of Grace’s family in relation to this tragic incident [Bednest’s lawyers initially tried to implicate Grace’s two-year- old sister in her death].’
In November 2017 Seána was re-elected as president by NCT grassroots members shocked at how she’d been treated. But she says her role became untenable. ‘I felt isolated, not listened to,’ she says. ‘Specific issues I wanted to be looked at were dismissed.’
Seána, whose children are aged 24, 21, and 18, says: ‘I think they have made a strategic decision to take the charity away from its traditional approach and into something the CEO sees as being more modern, but which many of us feel is less impactful.’
WHILE the NCT denies it is changing its core values, Nick Wilkie’s appointment in 2015 was always going to ruffle feathers.
However well-intentioned, there is only so much a man can understand about childbirth and breastfeeding, after all.
He arrived at the NCT in July 2015 from scandal-hit charity Save the Children, where he held the senior position of UK programmes director between 2013 and 2015, and which he left in the same year a review was being carried out after allegations of misconduct had been made
against two senior members of staff — its former chief executive Justin Forsyth and former policy director Brendan Cox.
Forsyth was accused of making inappropriate comments to three separate women, for which he has apologised unreservedly. Cox, 42, accused of sexual assault, denied the allegation but later acknowledged he had ‘made mistakes’ and ‘caused some women hurt and offence’.
In July 2015, Cox, widower of murdered labour MP Jo Cox, resigned from Save The Children. In January 2016, Forsyth followed.
There is absolutely no suggestion that Wilkie, a married father of three from South london, behaved inappropriately during his time at Save the Children, or had any connection with the alleged behaviour of Cox or Forsyth. I have heard it alleged this week, however, that he transported Save the Children’s ‘staff-led’ culture to the NCT, which has historically been guided by its members.
‘The NCT is a membership charity and the board’s responsibility is to those members,’ says Seána. ‘I won’t say they don’t understand this, but basically they ignore it. There’s no overtly
bad behaviour, but there’s a machine that clicks into place to close down dissent, whether it appears in the boardroom, among practitioners or among volunteers.’
NCT’s chair of trustees, Jessica Figueras, denied Seána’s allegations. She said a review had found no evidence of bullying at the NCT, which would be treated with ‘the utmost seriousness’ and not tolerated in any way.
however, executives appear determined to move the charity away from its roots. This month, the NCT’s instagram ‘stories’ — videos posted on the platform — were taken over by social media influencer Naomi Courts, who lists bottle feeding company Tommee Tippee as a partner on her instagram page, a decision that caused an uproar among some NCT breastfeeding counsellors.
Mother-of-three Michelle Bradley, 34, who left her job as a NCT practitioner last year, recalls being horrified by another NCT instagram post — later deleted — about how to get your pre-pregnancy body back. ‘We’re trying to take the pressure off parents; they’re piling it on,’ says Michelle. This week the NCT apologised for social media errors.
After Wilkie joined, he made membership of the NCT separate from the price of antenatal classes — which cost up to £22 an hour — and something women have to opt into rather than out of.
Membership plummeted and income has dropped by 10 per cent since 2016, from £17.3 million to £15.6 million a year. ‘his prediction was that membership would fall slightly but then pick back up again. ‘it hasn’t,’ says Seána. ‘ Since the new chief executive came in, the NCT’s income has fallen every single year. in any other business or sector, people would be asking questions.’
The NCT told the Mail it has delivered a total operating surplus of £1.4 m over the past four years’. Jessica Figueras admits facing ‘challenges on income’, but says the ‘significant reduction in membership income’ was anticipated.
What has arguably upset Seána most has been the way the NCT has handled a complaint Bryan Macpherson made about being bullied off the board. But no further investigation was commissioned.
After a distraught Seána walked out of a board meeting discussing Bryan’s case last March, she was told by another member that Wilkie brushed off the possibility she might resign with the words: ‘it will be OK. We’ll issue a statement and it will all blow over.’
Seána says she has been ‘ overwhelmed with support’ by others who share her concerns. Back home, however, her family is relieved she is no longer involved.
‘My husband said my mental health dipped every time i had to go to a board meeting,’ she says. ‘it affected my family as much as me.’
Nick Wilkie refused repeated requests for an interview from the Mail. Jessica Figueras said that after Seána complained about the decision to her force her to resign last June, the charity followed legal advice to work with Seána and a mediator: ‘ We are very grateful to Seána for her long and substantial contribution to the charity over the past 25 years and wish her well for the future.’