The chief executive of UK mental health charity Mind has told the Nottingham Inquiry that the charity sector has been too reluctant to acknowledge that people with severe mental illness can pose a risk of violence in some circumstances. Dr Sarah Hughes gave evidence to the inquiry examining the June 2023 killings of Barnaby Webber, Grace O’Malley-Kumar, and Ian Coates by Valdo Calocane in Nottingham, who was later sentenced to an indefinite hospital order after admitting manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.
In remarks reported by The Guardian on 5 September 2026, as the inquiry prepared for closing submissions on 8 and 9 September, Hughes said the sector had avoided confronting an uncomfortable reality. “We, as a charity sector, have failed to acknowledge that violence does happen in some circumstances,” she said. Mind’s own evidence summary submitted to the inquiry stated that “the current mental health system is not doing enough to support people with serious mental illness.”
Hughes framed Mind’s position as both a public safety and a patient welfare issue. “Our evidence is driven by a commitment to a mental health system that keeps the public safe and avoids people falling through the cracks when they are at their most vulnerable,” she said, according to Mind’s published evidence. The Nottingham Inquiry, chaired by Deborah Taylor and formally announced on 22 April 2025, held public hearings between 23 February 2026 and 5 June 2026, examining agency failures leading up to Calocane’s attacks, which also injured three pedestrians.
Professor Seena Fazel of the University of Oxford, a forensic psychiatry specialist, told The Guardian that the relationship between severe mental illness and violence is real but often misunderstood. “People with schizophrenia do have an elevated risk of violence compared with the general population, even after accounting for socioeconomic factors, but the absolute risk is small,” he said. “Only a minority will commit a serious violent act.”
The inquiry’s findings carry relevance beyond the UK. South Africa faces its own crisis in mental health provision, with the Gauteng Mental Health Marathon Project scandal — in which 144 psychiatric patients died after being moved from specialist facilities to unregulated NGOs in 2016 — standing as the starkest example of systemic failure. The South African Depression and Anxiety Group has repeatedly warned that under-resourced community mental health services leave vulnerable people without adequate supervision or support.
Hughes’s intervention has drawn attention to whether mental health advocacy organisations globally have prioritised destigmatisation campaigns at the expense of honest engagement with risk assessment and crisis intervention. The assertion that the sector broadly has “failed to acknowledge” violence risk is Hughes’s reported opinion rather than a finding independently confirmed by the inquiry or corroborated by multiple sources.
What remains unknown is whether the inquiry’s final report will endorse Mind’s position on sector-wide failure, and whether other mental health organisations will respond publicly. Cape Flats News will check for the inquiry’s closing submissions outcome and any further responses from UK mental health bodies after 9 September 2026.