Nottingham Public Inquiry

It has been announced that Her Honour (HH), Deborah Taylor will lead the public inquiry into the Nottingham attacks of June 2023. Ms Taylor is am experienced, former senior judge whose inquiry will last potentially two years before reporting and will take place in lieu of inquests in to the victims’ deaths: Ian Coates, Grace O’Malley-Kumar and Barnaby Webber. It will also consider the attacks against those three victims who survived and which are much less reported: Wayne Birkett, Sharon Miller and Marcin Gawronski.

Whilst the inquiry could begin “within a few weeks”, it may take as much as two years to fully report – so brace yourself for a lengthy process. In fairness to HH Taylor, she has to bring together all of the different aspects and angles on these terrible events and we know that currently standards at nine different reviews and other inquiries into the potential actions and / or failings of NHS, police, CPS and court agencies. There was an ‘unduly lenient’ process to appeal sentencing as well as several different types of inquiries in to Nottinghamshire Healthcare.

ASKING QUESTIONS

I hope we see more questions in the inquiry than we have already seen in the media and the public about the police. We know a misconduct meeting for three Leicestershire Police officers was postponed after “significant new information” (not yet specified) and that the Independent Office for Police Conduct is revisiting whatever has gone on there as well as continuing to investigate Nottinghamshire Police over their contacts. I’ve always had more questions about the policing actions than seem to be asked in public –

It seems Valdo Calocane was not assessed in police custody after arrest for his potential mental health problems –
This was despite every single contact with Nottinghamshire Police having previously involved MHA assessment or MHA processes. It’s therefore quite understandable when psychiatrists pop up four or five months later to make claims about his mental state at the time of the attacks, people are wondering about that.

Previous arrests: there may well be answers to this, but so far I’ve not seen it addressed at all –
Valdo Calocane was arrested a number of time in previous years and charged with assaulting a police officer whilst being “sectioned” in September 2021. He was charged with some offences but not others and there’s no obvious explanation in the public domain as to why that was the case.

We know a warrant was issued for his arrest in September 2022 and it remained unactioned in June 2023 –
Nottinghamshire Police has already accepted this was unacceptable albeit an Assistant Chief Constable stated it probably wouldn’t have made any difference because having been picked up on warrant, he would have been unlikely to be remanded to prison. Maybe … but it still needs exploring and no-one can know the impact it would have had.

Then of course there are all the questions about the other agency-specific aspects of this which are much less my business as I’m not qualified to invade.

GETTING ON WITH IT

The full Terms of Reference for the Inquiry are due to be laid in both libraries of the Houses of Parliament and once available, I will publish another posts with links and summaries as they don’t seem to be available yet.

I hope to see the inquiry start soon as I suspect this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to examine the interplay between these various state agencies and get into the Venn Diagram which sits at the heart of this website. We should forget it comes at a point where the police service is well in to a programme of change on their responses to mental health and I don’t think it’s unfair to ask how those changes would reveal themselves in the kinds of situations which happened in this case.