Councillor Apologises For ‘Speak English’ Remarks

A councillor who told a call handler from Sri Lanka to ‘speak English’ while reporting a fly-tipping incident has apologised.

Janet Cleverly, an independent on Newport City Council, has been reprimanded over her ‘derogatory and humiliating’ remarks, and told she must complete extra training.

She called the council’s customer service line and spoke to a call handler, who had only been in the job for four weeks after moving to the UK from Sri Lanka in 2022. 

During the conversation, in August 2024, the handler attempted to explain that there were ‘disruptive sounds’, and invited her to repeat specific details, but Cleverly then interrupted the handler and said: ‘I’m sorry, can I speak to somebody who’s speaking English?’, according to a report by the Ombudsman.

A few minutes later, when the call handler was attempting to clarify details, she said again: ‘Sorry? I can’t understand anything you’re saying. Speak English.’

The councillor followed up the call with an email to the cabinet member accountable for environmental matters, which read: ‘The person I spoke to could not speak English properly…

‘I am all for equal opportunity, but this person took all my information wrong after I had to repeat everything 3-4 times and spell everything lots of times.’

A customer services manager listened to a recording of the call and raised concerns over Cleverly’s ‘unnecessary’ tone.

Even though the call handler didn’t want to file a complaint, this led to an investigation.

A council monitoring officer assessed that the call handler’s English was fluent, and Cleverly’s remarks were ‘consciously or otherwise, racially motivated’ and ‘discriminatory’.

The customer service team manager said Cleverly had been ‘derogatory’ and ‘highly inappropriate’.

She said the called handler, who had only been in the role for around four weeks’, was left feeling ‘belittled and inferior’, and that she was not up to the job. 

For her part, Cleverly told the ombudsman that she had ‘lots of BME friends’, meaning people black and minority ethnic backgrounds.

She said it had been a ‘really frustrating’ phone call, and disagreed that the handler had spoken in a clear and fluent way.

However, she also apologised, saying she felt ‘absolutely awful’ about upsetting the handler.

Parts of Thursday’s committee hearing took place in private to safeguard the identity of the call handler, who was not attending.

Cleverly told the panel: ‘I was absolutely mortified by my actions that day.’

The committee found Cleverly had breached three areas of the council’s code for members relating to equality, respect and consideration of others, and disreputable conduct.

The ombudsman, Michelle Morris, found that her ‘underlying motivation’ was that she was ‘irritated from the outset by the way the call handler spoke’.

Cllr Kevin Whitehead, who leads the Bettws ward’s independents, said the phone call showed a ‘lack of etiquette’ from his colleague but questioned any suggestion there was a racial element to the matter.

Being a call handler is not the most straightforward job to do. You have to be courteous all the time, even if the person on the other end of the line is not – you still have to be polite. However, to be a call handler, you need a spine because some people on the other end of the line can be extremely rude, but you still have to take it on the chin because it’s your job, and if you are the type of person who gets easily offended, then it’s not the job for you!

It said that the ‘call handler’s’ English was fluent, evidently not that fluent if she couldn’t be understood.

If you want an English-speaking call handler and you are courteous about it, then I don’t see why you can’t have one. I am hard of hearing and I cannot always understand the call handler because they tend to talk extremely fast, and even though they are speaking English, it with an accent and I just can’t understand them, but I always point out that I am not being discriminatory, it’s just that they are talking too fast for me and I am hard of hearing, and they usually oblige.

However, it can be aggravating when you can’t understand someone, or they can’t understand you, and you have to keep repeating yourself. By the end of any phone call, I end up feeling like I’ve got Tourette’s! No discourtesy to those who do have Tourette’s.