A murder of crows: how a blog post deepened the conflict inside Greater Manchester Mental Health Trust

The interview

On a bright winter’s day in December 2023, an interview panel was convened at The Curve, a drab set of office buildings in Prestwich that form the headquarters of Greater Manchester Mental Health Trust. Referred to as GMMH, the Trust is in charge of NHS mental health provision across Manchester, Trafford, Salford, Wigan and Bolton, employing over 6,000 people.

And in 2023, the Trust was still reeling from a BBC Panorama programme broadcast the year before, in which bodycam footage gathered by undercover journalists captured staff abusing patients at one of GMMH’s units, the Edenfield Centre. Even today, staff talk about the Trust in terms of “before Panorama”, and “after Panorama”. The shocking revelations led the chair to resign, and in the ensuing year the Trust’s board of directors duly jumped ship too. Later, an independent review would attribute the tragedy at Edenfield, in part, to poor leadership, a failure to address issues head-on, and a culture of fear amongst staff who didn’t want to speak out.

The interview panel at The Curve was taking the first step in addressing those problems. It was appointing a new chair. There were three candidates: Beatrice Fraenkel, former chair of Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust; Lady Rhona Bradley, a former chief executive of a substance misuse charity; and Tony Warne, a former mental health nurse turned academic, with long grey hair often tied in a ponytail and a penchant for all black outfits.

The panel was made up of six governors and six observers — who the governors could speak about the candidates with, but had no say in who was appointed. Amongst the observers was Sir Richard Leese. Leese is the former leader of Manchester City Council and was by then chair of Greater Manchester’s Integrated Care Board, which oversees Greater Manchester’s NHS, allocating over £7bn in funds in the last financial year.

Each candidate passed through two stakeholder panels first — made up of clinical staff, patients and campaigners — before facing the governors and observers. Fraenkel and Bradley’s interviews went swimmingly. But according to my conversations with people from the stakeholder panels, Fraenkel appears to have been the favourite of the three. She had experience in managing a large Trust; equality, diversity and inclusion was built into her decision-making; she wanted the service to match the needs of its users. People liked her. When I contacted Fraenkel for this story, she chose not to comment.

Tony Warne was the last to be interviewed that day. But his presence had already been felt by the panel. His application was filed eight days late, but was still accepted. He had requested the interview date be pushed back a day to suit his schedule, and it was, to the inconvenience of many who were giving up the time to help with the appointment. Pushing the date back meant it clashed with one of the observers’ dialysis appointments, meaning she sat weak and tired through the interviews. Iris Nickson, a governor sitting on the interview panel, remembers worrying the observer would faint.

As Warne approached the door, Leese stood up to shake his hand as he entered. Warne, who had his long grey hair tied into a bun, took his position in front of the panel. “He had a real swagger,” Nickson remembers. He wore a black and grey tweed jacket, referred to Leese casually as “Richard”, and was a confident interviewee. 

Afterwards, when the panel was left to discuss the candidates, it began to feel like some of the observers were trying to push them towards choosing Warne. “It was really important that we have a fair process, that we chose someone who was going to lead us through this difficult time,” says Nathan Prescott, another governor who sat on the panel. “In my mind, it felt guided too much, rather than us having our own say,” he says, explaining how the then-director of corporate affairs and Leese seemed to be trying to steer the governors. 

As a “service user governor”, i.e. someone who has first-hand experience of being a patient of the Trust, Prescott says he has grown used to feeling patronised, or feeling as though people were trying to influence him. The interview panel was no different. “There was coercion, almost, in accepting Tony as the candidate.” When I sent questions about this to the Integrated Care Board, addressed to Leese, a spokesperson said Leese was a non-voting member and that “any suggestion of coercion is both inappropriate and misleading.” Nevertheless, Warne was appointed, taking up the post as chair in January last year.

A personal investigation

Over the last nine months, I have been contacted by psychologists on strike from Greater Manchester Mental Health Trust, and patients who feel left behind by it. In an attempt to understand the issues at the Trust, outlined in repeated external reviews in recent years, I have attended inquests into the deaths of people in its care. I’ve published three pieces related to the Trust in the last eight months.

The Trust is huge, clocking over half a billion in operating costs in the last financial year, covering units in hospitals across a huge swathe of Greater Manchester, providing services in the community and also in the city region’s prisons (services in Stockport, Bury, Rochdale, Oldham and Tameside are handled by Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust). It is led by a board of directors, a group of appointed paid professionals charged with managing the Trust’s strategy and decision-making. The board is separate from the council of governors, who are volunteers advocating for the areas or groups they represent. The Trust’s CEO, Karen Howell OBE, reports to Warne. She took up her role in June 2024, five months into his tenure.

Issues with senior leadership have been a common refrain in my interviews, although when I sent questions to the Trust for this piece, its leaders reassured me that “transparency and scrutiny are absolutely vital” to their work. They insist they're creating an environment where staff and governors alike are able to speak out.

The boards and structures that sit atop organisations like GMMH are difficult to penetrate. But a few weeks ago, I sat down for an interview with Iris Nickson — the governor who was on Warne’s interview panel — in the café at Manchester Central Library. Between us were a few folders and drifts of paperwork that threatened to slip off the edge of the table. They included birth certificates, marriage certificates, CVs, email screenshots and more. 

Not long after sitting on the panel that appointed him, Nickson launched a personal investigation into Warne. Warne — who on top of being emeritus professor in mental health at the University of Salford and giving speeches all over the world as an expert in that field — had a 20-year stint as a mental health nurse. But when Nickson began to examine that portion of his record, she found something else. The Trust hasn’t been able to comment on the specifics of the concerns Nickson has raised, but when she approached them about it, they told her to stop looking. Then, yesterday, they suspended her.