Social worker to face misconduct hearing

A social worker who was given a job with her local council’s child protection unit after she was convicted of plotting to murder her husband will face a misconduct hearing in November.

Lynda Barnes, 55, offered a contract killer £10,000 to “take out” her ex-husband Rodney.

She was given a two-year suspended prison sentence in 1995 and sacked from her job as a social worker in the child care department at the former Avon Council. But a decade later she secured a job leading a group of nearly 20 child protection staff at neighbouring authority Bath and North East Somerset Council after holding back details of her past.

Her deception came to light when she suggested that one of her colleagues lie under oath during a care proceedings court case in June 2008.
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The social worker raised the alarm and the council informed the judge overseeing the case, Judge Paul Barclay, who decided to investigate Barnes’s past.

Judge Barclay found that at the time of her appointment, she provided Bath and North East Somerset council with a “highly sanitised version of events”.

She also registered with the General Social Care Council (GSCC) in January 2006 after they believed her version of her role in the crime without checking with the Crown Prosecution Service.

Barnes, who has now resigned from her post, was due to appear before the GSCC in London this week to face unrelated allegations, but applied successfully for the hearing to be postponed.

The new claims centre on concerns about the safety of two young children at the heart of the care proceedings in which she allegedly asked her colleague to lie in 2008.

She is also alleged to have provided misleading and untrue information under oath, discussed a family proceedings case with a colleague despite being asked by the judge not to do so, and suggested this colleague should lie in court.

The GSCC hearing was adjourned until November 15.