Tag Archives: reading

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?