Our open letter in response to stigmatising and inaccurate Telegraph article

Dear Editor of the Daily Telegraph,

The inquiry examining the terrible killings in Nottingham and how services failed so catastrophically must provide answers for the families whose lives have been devastated and for the wider public. Our thoughts remain with the families of Barnaby Webber, Grace O’Malley-Kumar and Ian Coates, and all those whose lives were impacted by the attacks. This debate cannot become abstract. Its purpose must be to ensure that such unimaginable loss is not allowed to happen again.

This requires careful and responsible discussion, particularly while the hearings continue. News organisations have a duty not to inflame debate with inaccuracy or over-simplification. In publishing Philip Johnston’s article, ‘Valdo Calocane has proved Enoch Powell wrong’, the Telegraph has fallen short of that standard. Invoking Enoch Powell, a politician remembered for inflammatory and racist views, is a misplaced rhetorical device in the context of an ongoing inquiry and profound grief. 

The article risks reinforcing stigma. Johnston acknowledges that most people living with severe mental illness do not pose a risk to others and can be treated successfully. Yet he gestures towards broader use of detention and implies that a return to the era of psychiatric institutionalisation would offer greater public safety. Those positions sit uneasily together. It is precisely because most people living with severe mental illness are not dangerous that decisions about detention must be precise, evidence-based and applied only where serious risk is present.

The reality is that people experiencing severe mental illness are far more likely to harm themselves than anyone else. Week after week, inquests reveal deaths where people did not receive the care they needed. These systemic failings are common and devastating. Focusing disproportionately on exceptional cases, while overlooking chronic underinvestment and the repeated harm to people living with severe mental illness, distorts public understanding.

There were clearly grave failings in Nottingham, and those failings must be addressed nationally rather than treated as isolated errors. Where someone disengages from services, where risk escalates, where there are outstanding warrants, systems must respond decisively. As the evidence presented to the inquiry so far suggests, this is about competence, coordination and capacity within services that are too often stretched beyond safe limits.

Johnston’s characterisation of the new Mental Health Act is also inaccurate. For decades, people were unnecessarily detained under the previous Mental Health Act, stripped of dignity and choice. Reform was hard won. The updated Act strengthens the patient’s voice and safeguards without weakening public protection. It clarifies the criteria for detention, reinforces the requirement for therapeutic benefit, improves oversight and ensures families are properly involved. Detention will always be necessary in some cases of serious risk, but it must remain a careful, case-by-case clinical judgement. A system that relies too readily on coercion risks driving people away from seeking help at all.

Your newspaper has also reported on whether concerns about the over-representation of Black men in secure care played any part in decisions made in this case. That over-representation is a longstanding and serious inequality which demands action. However, it would never be appropriate to make an individual clinical judgement about risk on the basis of race. These are distinct issues. Conflating them risks obscuring both justice and safety.

Secure psychiatric provision already exists and will continue to exist. High, medium and low secure units are designed to protect both patients and the public where risk requires it. Failures often arise not because Victorian asylums no longer dominate the countryside; they occur because modern services, under sustained workforce and funding pressures, do not work as they should.

If we are serious about preventing future tragedies, we must focus on ensuring that mental health services are adequately staffed, sustainably funded and consistently led. Clinicians cannot deliver safe and therapeutic care in a system stretched beyond capacity and struggling to maintain continuity. We need services with the time, expertise and stability to build trusted relationships, identify risk early and intervene effectively. That is what will honour the families and help prevent further loss. 

Brian Dow 
Deputy Chief Executive, Rethink Mental Illness 
Chief Executive, Mental Health UK