If ever an organisation needed a fresh start, it was surely Cafcass. Set up by the government in 2001 to coordinate representation of children's interests before the courts, the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service had an appalling first two years. But alone of all those judged responsible, Judy Weleminsky does not see why she should go quietly if wider issues remain unaddressed.
In a stand-off that is testing the limits of ministerial authority over non-departmental public bodies (NDPBs), Weleminsky is defying a "request" by Lord Falconer, constitutional affairs secretary, that she join the other members of the original Cafcass board in resigning. Why should she fall on her sword, she reasons, when she has been outspoken in her concerns about the body - an almost whistleblower, as she puts it - and has been proved right.
Unable to persuade her to go voluntarily, Falconer has now moved to dismiss Weleminsky. Citing her very outspokenness, he has told her he is minded to terminate her board membership on grounds of failure to observe confidentiality, failure tobehave "in a corporate manner" and inappropriate behaviour towards Cafcass staff. He has suspended her and given her until the end of next week to enter a defence, after which he will reach a final decision.
In practical terms, the row is a sideshow. Cafcass is making that fresh start under a new sponsoring department, education and skills, and with a new interim board led by Labour peer Lady Pitkeathley. Recruitment of a fresh permanent board is under way. In a wider context, however, the episode raises serious questions about governance of NDPBs and the proper role of members of their boards. Are such appointees equivalent to non-executive directors of commercial enterprises, bound by corporate loyalty, or are they public representatives put there to ask awkward questions and, if it comes to it, blow the whistle?
Weleminsky is clear. "If you want a compliant board who just listen to what their senior executives tell them, nod sagely and approve what they do, then don't recruit somebody like me," she says. "But we were being paid for four days' work a month; we knew that the work of Cafcass was very important to children and to families; I would have thought that the public appointment required us to pursue it with every vigour. Isn't that what people expect?"
What certainly had been expected of Weleminsky were the skills and experience of a former magistrate and charity chief executive who went on to lead the National Council for Voluntary Organisations. For the past 10 years, she has been a consultant to voluntary groups on issues often focusing on governance. She serves also as a board member of another NDPB, the General Social Care Council, which she applied for after joining Cafcass and which she has found wholly different.
"I find issues are dealt with honestly there," she says. "If I or colleagues ask for something to be done, it is done - it's responded to." Conceding that the council's culture, which includes open board meetings, may be "unusually good", she adds: "I do think it makes an enormous difference if you have greater openness, because the more openness and accountability there is, the more people have to behave in the way the public would expect."
It is evident that Weleminsky was pressing for more openness and accountability at Cafcass from the start. Even before it began, she was protesting at the lack of budget information available to the board and calling (unsuccessfully) for a special meeting. That set the tone for her relations with the former chairman, Anthony Hewson, who resigned last October a fortnight after sending Falconer a dossier recommending her dismissal. It is on the basis of the dossier that Falconer is now proposing just that.
Hewson's evidence has been assessed by a senior civil servant, David Crawley, head of the Scotland Office in Falconer's department, who has concluded that it suggests that Weleminsky "does not see herself as a corporate member of the team and does not regard herself as bound by normal conventions of collective discussion and decision making". Though he appears unconvinced of her allegedly inappropriate behaviour towards staff - said to have been manifest in "incessant" emails and a "surprising and possibly intrusive questioning style" - Crawley does find much to support the charges that she showed herself unable to behave corporately and repeatedly flouted confidentiality.
Among the specific evidence in the dossier are charges that Weleminsky presented her own, unauthorised evidence on Cafcass to the Commons constitutional affairs select committee; that she provided sensitive information to a national newspaper, gave an unapproved radio interview and submitted unauthorised articles to a magazine; and that she continually refused to abide by a board decision to withdraw support for an unofficial staff website.
Weleminsky denies little of this. But she insists she felt duty-bound to take such steps to try to remedy deep-rooted problems in an organisation dealing with children's welfare - in extremis, in life-and-death circumstances. "I felt that my role there was almost one of whistleblower," she says, "because the board was allowing the organisation to pretend that Cafcass was sorting problems out and the problems were disappearing, when in fact the key difficulty people were worried about - the delay in allocating guardians [to represent children's interests] - was getting worse. A misleadingly optimistic presentation was being put to the media and I didn't think that was right."
At the heart of the controversy over her role, she argues, is that confidentiality and corporateness feature not at all in the "Nolan rules", the precepts of the committee on standards in public life that all public bodies are meant to observe. The seven Nolan principles are selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, honesty, leadership - and openness.
"I feel that the pressure to be corporate is in direct conflict with the requirements of Nolan," says Weleminsky. "And we surely need to clarify whether we are supposed to be confidential or open."
Her former Cafcass board colleagues may find such a rationale hard to stomach. "Judy was extremely destructive from the word go," says one, who argues that the board was saddled with a near-impossible job and only 75% of the money needed to do it. "She pursued a personal agenda against one or two people almost from day one. I don't know what ship she came in on, but it wasn't the same one as me."
Even this critic, though, agrees that there are fundamental issues to be debated about the way NDPBs are set up and run. "I have heard of at least one other organisation in the same kind of mess as Cafcass found itself in," says Weleminsky's former colleague. "For all I know, it may be happening even as we speak."
Age 53
Status Partner; two daughters
Lives Kew, south-west London
Education University of Birmingham, BSc psychology; Lancaster University, MA organisational psychology
Career Brief stint in industry, equal opportunities work in local government, and then voluntary sector. Became director of the National Federation of Community Organisations (Community Matters) in 1982, and in 1985 director of the National Schizophrenia Fellowship (Rethink). 1991-94, director of the National Council for Voluntary Organisations. Now in consultancy with the Compass Partnership.
Interests Tennis; trustee of the Makaton Vocabulary Development Project (for people with learning disabilities).