Hold To Account

A press release by Simon Foster, the Police and Crime Commissioner for the West Midlands was drawn to my attention yesterday regarding the Right Care, Right Person programme. It follows on from media coverage the scheme received by Times journalist Fiona Hamilton in September 2025 (with a subsequent follow-up piece in early November).  The PR piece by the PCC is reproduced in full below, as insurance against it disappearing from the internet.

I wouldn’t have felt inclined to comment on this piece if it weren’t for a few factors which I believe renders the statement somewhat disingenuous, especially around the repeated use of the phrase “hold to account” – PCCs love to tell us how they “hold Chief Constables to account” or some similar language and Mr Foster has done it twice in just one short statement, below.

So here are just a few things Mr Foster did not mention, but could have done, at the point where his press release went out (very quietly) in September 2025 –

• The Chief Constable in Parliament
• The appearance of the Chief Constable at the Health & Social Care select committee of the House of Commons on 19th September 2023 where he made various non-factual claims, including a non-trivial error around his own force’s use of section 136 MHA (for which published statistics do exist and they are statistics reported by forces to the Home Office).
• He reported West Midlands Police using s136 two thousand times a year in Birmingham – in fact, the most recent published data at the point of that claim showed West Midlands Police reported use of s136 wasn’t even as much as 2,000 a year for the whole force area, never mind just Birmingham.
• Did he hold the Chief to account for mis-informing the select committee about demand? – no, of course he didn’t.

• Preventing Future Death reports
• He left unmentioned the two Preventing Future Death reports issued by His Majesty’s Coroners in the West Midlands after the deaths of Tcherno Bari and Sebastian “Benji” Oliver.
• And in particular I was left wondering how much detail he engaged in, when examining those reports, if he was even aware of them?
• Mr Foster states in his press release, “I have been holding West Midlands Police to account, to ensure that people facing acute mental health crisis, receive the right care, from the right person and at the right time” – of course, Mr Oliver didn’t because the police refused to respond to a situation where he absented himself from hospital in circumstances which amounted to an immediate risk to life and nobody in the NHS knew where he was – WMP took the view an ambulance was the correct response to “ensure … the right care, from the right person”.
• So where do they sent the yellow ambulance, Mr Foster? – nobody knows were he is.

• The PFD for Mr Oliver in particular should also cause alarm bells to ring because the person who responded to the Coroner on behalf of the Chief Constable was asked to address the question of whether the key error in that case (to shut down an incident without a police response) was a systemic or an individual problem?
• For all the reports and updates requested and received, I would have imagined it was quite easy to establish how systemic that problem is, but instead the PFD response hangs out the individual call hander to dry and reassures us RCRP is sound despite there being no evaluation anywhere which dispassionately shows this.

• Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998
• I also notice he also leaves entirely unmentioned the very reason he’s issuing a press release: the report I submitted to WMP in September 2023 warning of legal violations and risks to human life.
• When the force ignored it, I sent it to him in January 2024 and he decided to do nothing about it because, he said, senior health partners were not raising similar concerns.
• It’s something he chose deliberately to do nothing about – only for the force to subsequently receive the two PFD notices mentioned above after two deaths (and there are way more nationally).
• Of course, why would senior health partners raise concerns RCRP training they hadn’t seen or received was inadequate and replete with legal errors?! – they wouldn’t know, would they?!
• And which “senior health managers” did he consult – mental health trust, ambulance, Emergency Departments, ICB commissioners or all / some of the above?  He didn’t say.  But unless he did them all, he would receive only a partial picture of things.
• And if I may ask: what do they know about it? – one of those senior partners would have been the MH trust Chief Executive who also made mistakes in front of the select committee on 19th September!
• So it’s all very well for him to claim he holds the Chief Constable to account, but the reality is when given evidence of legal problems, training problems and the errors in Parliament and the risks to human life, he chose to do nothing at all – those warnings were then realised (as indeed other warnings I’d given WMP in 2019 also were borne out in difficult inquests).

ACCOUNTABILITY

You see: this is one of the problems with seeking to deliver “accountability” by asking the wrong questions of people who seem to not understand the topic sufficiently and make basic errors.  The reality is this business is complicated and that’s not just my view – it’s a recurring feature of the academic insights in to the topic and it is resistant to simplification as my only-ever interaction with the Chief Constable himself showed and which Mr Foster’s press release shows.

I had an opportunity to ask Mr Guildford a question at one of his early roadshows at Wolverhampton police station when he had been in the role for two months and it just served to show how RCRP was the go-to reassurance response for just about anything mental health related in policing, even if that makes no sense and even before it was actually introduced and this was despite my asking a closed question for which there was nothing to be gained or lost by his answer.

Was he aware, when taking on his new job at WMP, the force at that time had no joint protocols with its statutory partners about how the Mental Health Act should operate and that HM Coroners in the West Midlands had occasion to issue more than one PFD notice to the force about how the lack of such policies may give rise to future deaths?! … and incidentally, it still didn’t at the point I left, five years after being told (twice) to sort it out.

Obviously, the answer to that question is either “Yes” or “No” – he either was or he was not aware of it and either way ’round, a subsequent comment could just have been “and we’re going to sort that out because it’s clearly not acceptable we expose our officers and the public to such risk.”  Then tell his staff officer (who was in the room at the time) to get the MH lead to sort that out ASAP – job done.  Instead he told me that what he was going to do was contact Humberside police and get all their policies, legal advice and training for RCRP and do that in the West Midlands as well.

Of course, RCRP is not a solution at all to that particular problem about joint protocols – there is very limited overlap between RCRP and the five protocol topics (on s136 handovers and on conveyance of patients detained under the MHA) but most of the issues requiring a protocol are entirely unaffected by RCRP. So I was left wondering whether he understood the question and / or whether he reached for an response which appears convincing as long as no-one understands the topic they’re asking about. In fairness to him, it’s not the only example of a police body reaching for the “RCRP reassurance” – that everything will just get better because of it – when being asked about things that are nothing whatsoever to do with it.

And this post in response to Mr Foster’s PR release wouldn’t have been necessary if the release itself wasn’t partial, and either disingenuous or obfuscatory, depending on your view. If he really is keen to “improve outcomes for vulnerable people”, his office could commission a piece of work to see if outcomes have, in fact, been improved for vulnerable people – nobody has done that yet.

Nobody.

Foster S PCC Statement, Right Care, Right Person –
22nd September 2025, downloaded 08th December 2025.

https://www.westmidlands-pcc.gov.uk/pcc-statement-right-care-right-person/

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Awarded the President’s Medal, by
the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

Winner of the Mind Digital Media Award

 

All opinions expressed are my own – they do not represent the views of any organisation.
(c) Michael Brown, 2026
I am not a police officer.

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