A solicitor who sent hundreds of letters to schools across the country during the Covid pandemic has told a tribunal she did so in a bid to protect children.
Lois Yvonne Bayliss, of Sheffield-based Broad Yorkshire Law, is alleged to have threatened civil and/or criminal liability if the recipients required face masks to be worn in schools, carried out routine lateral flow tests or facilitated Covid vaccinations for children aged 12-17.
The Solicitors Regulation Authority said the letters were written on Bayliss’s firm’s headed paper, with covering emails from its email address, and were sent to 247 schools and academies. Bayliss is also alleged to have encouraged 48 other people to send similar letters.
Giving evidence during the second day of a Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal hearing, Bayliss, admitted in 2006, said she had not been acting under instructions and ‘had no intention of making a claim’.
She added: ‘I had no intention of taking any action even though I knew of children being harmed. I just did not want to get involved in that side of it. I did not want to earn off the back of this. It was all about protection.’
Bayliss told the tribunal her ‘main concern was the children’ and if people got in touch to ask for the letters, she would share them. Asked if she thought it was ‘dangerous’ that a solicitor’s letter was freely available to be shared or distributed, Bayliss said: ‘No, what I think is dangerous is children being vaccinated in schools when there are more harms than benefits.’
Benjamin Tankel, for the SRA, said: ‘Were you concerned about the letters being out in the public?’
‘That was the intention of sending them,' Bayliss replied. 'I wanted the schools to see them.’
Speaking of the individuals who contacted her asking for the letter, Bayliss said: ‘I wanted to help them. They were in a huge distress, these people were absolutely petrified, in massive fear. They came to me because the letters were out there, the advert had gone out, they knew they had somebody to come to.
‘A lot of people were so frustrated because government agencies were not responding to them. They had nowhere to go, nobody to turn to. [I] was someone they could have a chat to, vent it out and someone that actually believed some of the things they were saying, that had the same belief system in some respects.’
Bayliss told the panel that the letters were drafted by others. Another solicitor wrote the vaccination letter and a chartered health and safety practitioner wrote the facemask and lateral flow test letter. Bayliss drafted the text for the covering emails before sending the letters. She described the letters as a ‘warning’ and not a letter before action.
She added: ‘The letters that I sent out, I only got about 15 responses. It was well known that schools, authorities, public health, nobody was responding. I sent 247 letters out and only got about 15 responses. They would have disregarded it as just misinformation from some Covid nutter. You [the SRA] made that assumption.’
Bayliss said she accepted that sending the letters on firm-headed notepaper ‘would have impacted credibility and teachers would have taken notice of it’. She added: ‘I wanted them to take notice, look into it a bit more before they went ahead.’
The four-day hearing continues.
