Hidden Cameras. Joe Plomin

      UNDERCOVER TALES

True Stories of DIY Filming

      Vanessa Evans is a seemingly ordinary woman whose experience using hidden cameras I know particularly well, because she worked with me on a Panorama film based partly on the secret footage she recorded.

      She is not a journalist; she lives in Croydon, works long hours as a childminder, has a young child herself and, on top of that, always used to look after her grandmother. To her it was just natural; she was always her grandmother’s main carer.

      The grandmother, Yvonne Grant, was also a Croydon lady. A hard-working woman, she had laboured as a seamstress and finally was head of dressmaking in a Croydon department store for most of her life. She lived her whole life in South London. She was part of the community.

      Eventually, though, Yvonne needed more care than Vanessa could provide. There were particular things, like needing help with getting to the toilet, which were difficult for Yvonne unless she had care right there with her. Until the end, Yvonne ‘maintained her dignity’ as she saw it: going to the toilet and not using an incontinence pad was vitally important to her.

      The care home Yvonne moved into was the best that the council was willing to fund, Vanessa says. A 61-bed institution, the home was on the corner of a roundabout but otherwise was surrounded by residential housing. However, from the off, Vanessa was not happy with what she saw. She remembers that Yvonne:

      …was constantly waiting and asking for the toilet. Every time I went in she’d say, ‘Oh, I’ve been asking, I desperately need the toilet, no one will take me.’ I would hear her calling them, and she’d be told, ‘in a minute’, or ‘after you’ve eaten’, or ‘you can’t go now because there’s no staff, one’s on break’. A lot of the time she’d be waiting, sometimes up to an hour, even with me going and asking. We had to wait.

      It was not just worries about the toilet – as upsetting and indeed potentially painful as that could be for her grandmother. Vanessa says that there were also worrying bruises. Vanessa also had concerns about the attitude of some staff. She made complaints about what she saw but wasn’t satisfied with the response.

      ‘I’d go in there and she’d start crying and she’d say, “I just don’t want to be here anymore.” I knew that something wasn’t right, but exactly what I didn’t know, or I didn’t know until I put in the camera,’ Vanessa told us for the film we broadcast on Panorama.

      Whether to put in a secret camera was a debate, as it was a challenge. Was it necessary to use hidden cameras? Was it proportionate? Was there another way that the problems could be resolved?

      A while later, I asked Vanessa to reflect back on her experience – to think about what went well and what she would do differently if she had her time again. What she told me was very interesting for people doing their own filming in future, because it epitomises the fine balance involved with these considerations.

      Vanessa told me that she would get a camera in that room sooner, but that she would have gathered better evidence