The report of Judge Coroner Sir Adrian Fulford was the conclusion of a long process that started well before the horrifying attack in Forbury Gardens in that warm summer after lockdown in 2020.

The attack rocked Reading and the communities around it hard; the report of the Judge Coroner should rock the country.  The process it concludes and summarises is a litany of failure after failure, from the clunking fist of state agencies such as the rotten Home Office right down to local, entirely understandable human failures on the ground which didn’t have good processes around them to stop them happening.

One thing that’s clear from the report is the siloed, hot-potato attitude of agency after agency, closing cases as they passed the attacker on to the next underfunded, constantly-fire-fighting agency so they could wash their hands of him.  Anyone who has worked in a complex organisation will recognise this classic symptom of chronic underfunding and toxic management.

Every time something like this happens, state bodies and agencies put out sombre statements of condolence, solidarity, and lessons being learned.  But as politicians trying to do the best for our communities, and particularly as Liberals, we need to demand better than this.

Every time something like this happens, equally, the same arguments are dusted off and wheeled out about better communication between organisations and agencies (obvious), better funding for them all (also obvious), and an inevitable increase in tough rhetoric about punishing this sort of thing, locking them up and throwing the key, giving ever more draconian powers to the police, and so on (depressing).

Our town will never be the same again after the events of 20th June, 2020.  So how do we make sure our response won’t be the same again either?

For a start, there’s a strong Liberal argument for disbanding the Home Office or at least splitting its responsibilities between other government departments.  That the department responsible for immigration is also responsible for the police is what lies at the root of so much of what is wrong with Britain’s approach to immigration.  Events and reports for the last decade or more, and the tendency of formerly-liberal-leaning Home Office ministers and Home Secretaries to become deeply authoritarian shows that the perfidious and hostile culture of the department requires wholesale change.  Separating immigration, police and other responsibilities either into separate departments under an umbrella-style Home Office (as they do in Italy), or into entirely separate departments and abolishing the Home Office entirely (as they have in Canada) are both workable models we could follow. 

Second, there’s an even stronger Liberal argument for strengthening the safety net of channels of communication, support and response that failed to protect everyone concerned in June 2020.  This isn’t just a matter of throwing money at a problem, but engaging in true reform to ensure that agencies talk to each other, are encouraged, willing and able to support each other, and have processes in place to support victims of all kinds, potentially threatening individuals, and the people around both of them.  It’s clear from the Fulford report that the holes in this net, at so many stages, were what ultimately failed everyone that Summer.  Ensuring that responsible agencies communicated, that processes were in place to inform and support decision-making people, and that individuals assessed as problematic or high-risk by one agency were treated appropriately by others, would be by far the best response.  It is this angle which Justice Coroner Fulford can be expected to most strongly lean into in his recommendations to government ministers.

In the coming months, particularly if the government changes, Liberal Democrats should remember the shocking events in Reading in June 2020, and the litany of failure in the Fulford report, and press the government, of whatever stripe, to ensure that the recommendations are acted on, rather than forgotten or twisted to authoritarian ends by others.

* John Grout is a Lib Dem activist and lives in Reading.