Valdo Calocane was dangerous, not vulnerable

The best description of the failures of multiple agencies to contain the risk posed by the Nottingham triple-murderer, Valdo Calocane, came from the parent of one of his victims. Speaking on Wednesday night’s edition of Newsnight, Emma Webber, the mother of 19-year-old student Barnaby, described it as ‘an appalling horror show’.

Webber was reacting to an independent review commissioned by the NHS into the care of Calocane, a profoundly mentally disturbed man who went on a knife rampage in Nottingham city centre in June 2023. He claimed the lives of two other people before police stopped him – Grace O’Malley-Kumar, like Barnaby a 19-year-old student, and Ian Coates, a 65-year-old school caretaker. Calocane went on to try to run down three other pedestrians, injuring them in the process. There is no doubt that he was intent on murdering as many people as he possibly could.

The review into the behaviour of Nottinghamshire NHS Mental Health Trust, which was primarily responsible for managing Calocane, is a document marinaded in complacency, incompetence, naivety and lethal failure. It found that the risks Calocane posed to the community were not fully understood, managed, documented or communicated.

Calocane was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, but there was a failure to enforce treatment. He even refused to take long-lasting antipsychotics due to his fear of needles. There were hugely consequential missed opportunities for intervention. Requests were made for Calocane to be placed on a community-treatment order, which would have allowed for more stringent monitoring and treatment, but these were not acted upon.

There were systemic failures, too. The review exposed a workplace that never learned from its mistakes. It described ‘a culture of isolationism across the organisation’. It was clear these communication problems between the parts of the trust that managed Calocane in hospital and in the community directly contributed to the inadequate management of his condition.

Worryingly, the problems with Nottinghamshire NHS Mental Health Trust’s management of Calocane were not aberrations specific to this particular organisation. We have overwhelming evidence that the failures identified here are replicated across many other state agencies tasked with keeping people safe.

Indeed, on the same day as the review into the trust’s treatment of Calocane was published, so too was a ‘learning review ’ into how the counter-extremism strategy, Prevent, interacted with Axel Rudakubana before he committed the Southport atrocity. The review revealed many of the same failures: inflexible processes, incurious practitioners, communications problems, failure to enforce treatment and missed opportunities to intervene.

To prevent the next spree killer, likely already in gestation, we need to address the key conflict between what I call the ‘vulnerability’ and ‘harm’ paradigms. Today, the vulnerability paradigm dominates the management of dangerous people. This means that those working for state agencies are conditioned to pay far more attention to the safeguarding needs of individuals like Calocane or Rudakubana, than to their capacity to harm others.

This a complete reversal of the equally rotten situation that prevailed many decades ago. Back then, the harm paradigm dominated. We locked up people in asylums for decades, destroying the lives of many who would never have hurt anyone and who were frequently less mad than their captors. Striking the right balance is difficult to maintain in a free society. But we have strayed too far into territory where it seems the rights of potential perpetrators are elevated above our right to be protected from them.

In Northern Ireland, where I grew up during the Troubles, there was a grubby euphemism used by politicians to downplay the occasional atrocity. It would be dismissed as ‘an acceptable level of violence’. We must not be drawn towards a similar counsel of despair that simply accepts it is impossible to stop maniacs like Calocane and Rudakubana. Because it is possible, especially if those employed to manage and mitigate the risk posed by such individuals carry out their duties.

Perhaps if we didn’t have such a void of accountability, that cultural cancer deep in the bones of the administrative state, we might have some prospect for improvement. Poor Barnaby Webber’s broken mother had to fight the state to get the full report on Calocane into the public domain. She put her finger on the problem in her dignified outrage: ‘They just didn’t do their jobs properly.’

Ian Acheson is a former prison governor. He was also director of community safety at the Home Office.