YESTERDAY, a sickening report was released into the failings at the Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS mental health trust at its regional hospital in Middlesbrough which highlighted a failure of leadership where bosses didn’t listen to staff or patients when they raised concerns and to a toxic culture of abuse among the workforce. These conditions have led to a collapse in confidence among the public in their mental health trust to help them.

Another day and a similar sort of report is released into the failings of the Metropolitan Police which shows how the public in London have lost confidence in their police force to protect them.

The Met’s failings are far broader and more deeply ingrained than those at the health trust. It is astonishing that over the 24 years since the Macpherson report into the Met’s racist handling of Stephen Lawrence’s murder nothing has changed.

Two comments after the publication of the Casey report into the Met seem to translate across to the health trust.

First of all, Met Police chief Mark Rowley said: “The biggest danger is that this becomes another report.” There are so many reports into the Met that there is a library of them, but nothing changes. Similarly, there has been a series of reports into the deaths of Emily, Nadia and Christie and the public now needs to see that changes are being made at the health trust.

Secondly, Baroness Louise Casey said you need to be wary of new management which comes in promising great structural changes when it is the culture of the organisation that has to be addressed, too. The independent report into the health trust showed how desperately that sort of change was needed among the people entrusted to care for our most vulnerable youngsters.