Nottingham attacks inquiry lays bare 'catastrophic collapse of responsibility' as families demand action
As the 14-week public inquiry into the 2023 Nottingham attacks concluded, the families of victims Barnaby Webber, Grace O'Malley-Kumar and Ian Coates said on June 8 it had exposed a "catastrophic collapse of responsibility" by the NHS and police. The hearings detailed how Valdo Calocane, sectioned four times and the subject of an unexecuted arrest warrant, was discharged by mental-health services months before he killed three people and wounded three others. The families urged the government to act before chair Deborah Taylor KC's final report next year, and called for doctors to breach patient confidentiality when a patient poses a risk to others.
The families of the three people murdered in the 2023 Nottingham attacks said a public inquiry had exposed a "catastrophic collapse of responsibility" by the authorities meant to protect them, speaking at a London press conference on June 8 after the 14-week inquiry concluded its oral evidence. Valdo Calocane, who had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in 2020, stabbed to death Barnaby Webber and Grace O'Malley-Kumar, both 19, and Ian Coates, 65, and tried to kill three others in the early hours of 13 June 2023. He is serving an indefinite hospital order after admitting three counts of manslaughter by diminished responsibility and three of attempted murder, against survivors Wayne Birkett, Sharon Miller and Marcin Gawronski.
"This wasn't bad luck. It was a catastrophic collapse of responsibility -- an undoubted miscarriage of justice that must now be addressed," said Barnaby's mother, Emma Webber, who called the hearings "brutal, bruising and harrowing beyond measure" and accused authorities of "cover-up over candour." "Mental health services failed to treat and manage. Police repeatedly failed to act. Agencies didn't talk. Individuals chose to look the other way," she said, urging the government to meet the families within a month: "Excuses stop here and accountability starts today."
The inquiry, led by retired judge Deborah Taylor KC, sat at Mary Ward House in London from 23 February and heard 164 witnesses. It detailed an arrest warrant issued in September 2022, after Calocane failed to appear in court for assaulting PC Barnaby Pritchard, that police did not execute in the nine months before the killings. Nottinghamshire's former chief constable, Kate Meynell, accepted he should have been arrested beforehand, and police bosses called the lapse a "serious and systemic and operational failure." Grace's father, Dr Sanjoy Kumar, called it "perhaps the biggest missed opportunity."
Calocane had been sectioned four times under the Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, the first in May 2020, before its Early Intervention in Psychosis team discharged him to his GP in 2022 after he stopped attending appointments and the service "lost" him. During an earlier admission, a doctor had warned he could "end up killing someone." In May 2020, during a psychotic episode, he kicked in the door of a woman's flat in Radford; she fell from a window while fleeing and needed surgical metalwork fitted to her spine, and was told he could not be prosecuted because of his mental health.
The inquiry also exposed failures to share information between police, clinicians and Calocane's family -- his mother, Celeste, said she learned of decisions about his care, including a 2022 hospital admission, only after the attacks. In May, Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust said it had dismissed 11 staff for inappropriately accessing victims' medical records, with 12 given final written warnings and two first warnings, while the Independent Office for Police Conduct opened five investigations into police forces.
O'Malley-Kumar's mother, Dr Sinead O'Malley-Kumar, herself a doctor, blamed the psychiatrists who discharged her son's killer, saying she would "never forgive them," questioning whether they were "fit to practise" and urging the regulator to examine their conduct. She and Sanjoy Kumar argued clinicians should breach patient confidentiality when public safety is at risk: "The safety of society as a whole, even as a doctor, overrides the autonomy of a single patient," Kumar said. Prime Minister Keir Starmer's spokesman said the government was "committed to delivering the fundamental changes needed to prevent violence by those who are mentally unwell." Closing statements are due in September, with Taylor's final report and recommendations expected next year; the organisations involved will be under no legal obligation to implement them.