Back in the day (2011), a staff member wrote a letter to the Sloven CEO raising concerns about various things including safety. She concluded:
The CEO bounced the letter to the Associate Director of Governance who wrote back saying that there were concerns and unfilled vacancies in the governance team including a lack of suitably qualified health and safety leadership. An interim Head of Health, Safety and Security was to be appointed for 4-6 months.
This interim head was Mike Holder. A couple of months later, Holder resigned over concerns about Sloven safety culture. He wrote a report in Feb 2012 detailing these concerns:
At present it is my professional opinion that Health and Safety is considered an adjunct to the Trust’s core business rather and integral element of it. This assumption is based on my experience with the Trust to date, the lack of resourcing applied to the management of health and safety and information governance with regards to the maintenance of statutory records.
Blimey. Warning lights a go go.
But no. By this time the Sloven headlights were on an NHS organisation, the Ridgeway Partnership, 100 miles away in Oxfordshire which included the STATT unit in which LB died. Ridgeway had some chunky land icing to tempt outside Trusts (including Calderstones) to take it over.
The story can be taken up at this point by the shuddery Verita 2 report* which found that after Sloven ‘won’ the Ridgeway in November 2012, the roadshow bolted back to Sloven towers, more senior Sloven staff resigned and the Oxfordshire services were left to fester in a slow cooker of discontent, fear, malaise and isolation from the mothership. Extracts from the Verita report state:
6.42 Difficulties arose soon after the acquisition in ensuring the availability of sufficient senior and experienced divisional managers to take forward vital post-acquisition actions. In particular to progress actions arising from the various quality assessments that had taken place before the acquisition.
6.50 A ‘business as usual’ methodology for a newly acquired service may appear appropriate if the service being acquired is mature and relatively problem-free. This was not the case in the Ridgeway services. Contact Consulting had warned of issues in local leadership; governance of serious incidents, along with particular difficulties about care issues in non-Oxfordshire services. There was also a need to begin dealing with the cultural change required of an established learning disability service joining a large mental health and community trust with a small learning disability service.
The writing on the wall. A baguette crumb trail through the NHS forest of cover up, fakery, denial and self interest. From 2011 to the present day. Evidence, evidence, evidence. Death. And evidence and death.
So where are we at? Two months after publication of the Mazars death review. Almost three years since LB was admitted to what we thought was sharp, specialist unit with a tiny number of patients and a shed load of staff… Five years after the original whistleblowing letter? Hold on to your hats, folks. We’re waiting for Monitor (NHS snooze hounds) to appoint a temporary, er, Head of Health, Safety and Security Improvement Director.
Yes. Really.
*This report really makes your skin crawl in its tortuous weaving through damning evidence to a conclusion that the Sloven board were not connected to LB’s death. The author left Verita straight after it was published.


A student, Andrew, came round on Saturday. From Yorkshire. He’s doing a pre-university diploma in media and is making a short film about what happened to LB for his coursework and to raise awareness among the students at his college. He was sensitive, quiet, thoughtful and careful in setting up his equipment. In conducting the interview. It couldn’t have been an easy task.













