A sad story in today's Daily Mirror:
A charity was fined £30,000 yesterday for failing to protect a care worker stabbed to death by a paranoid schizophrenic.
Crazed Ronald Dixon, 39, knifed Ashleigh Ewing, 22, 39 times in the chest only months after threatening to kill the Queen outside Buckingham Palace. The psychology graduate was sent on a visit alone to his rented flat in Heaton, Newcastle, on the last day of a six-month probation with Mental Health Matters in 2006....
*wearily*
Stop right there. Download the 2009 accounts from the Charities Commission website. Cut and paste therefrom as follows (click to enlarge):
Right. Now who do you think will end up paying that £30,000 fine?
*/wearily*
Going on the dry
2 hours ago
7 comments:
'Mental Health Matters'...
...'H&S, though, that doesn't really matter all that much...'
Well they will, of course. Just because we pay for them, doesn't mean we are paying the fine. If they didn't have to pay the fine, they'd just waste the money on something else.
Otherwise you'd be maintaining that your employer paid for your groceries, no, hang on, your employer's customers paid for them, no, sorry, your employer's customers' employers paid... etc ad nauseam.
I love the way they describe receiving cheques from the state as a charitable activity!
Don't charities go out and work for their money any more? You know, rattling tins, organising charity auction etc?
Have I read this right?
Northern Rock has paid six and a half K towards the manslaughter of a 22 year old probationer working for peanuts when we have already bailed them out AND we already paid over 4 million quid to make sure that paranoid schizophrenics who have stopped taking their medication could be visited by two burly officers instead of someone little more experienced than a junior guide leader.
For various reasons of legal complexity it is difficult to make charges of corporate manslaughter stick but if ever a CEO deserved to be handed a prison sentence pour encourager les autres, Ian Grant, chief executive of Mental Health Matters, is that person.
Needless to say he has rushed in to defend himself instead of resigning and chucking himself over a cliff in a fit of remorse at his abject failure. "At no time has the HSE sought to suggest that the failure in procedures caused the appalling attack on Ashleigh, which all other health bodies involved suggest was entirely unforeseeable" he whinged, hugging the 4m quid close and implying that it is all our fault for not giving him even more money.
Was it unpredictable? Well I could have predicted it and exactly why, but then I'm an ordinary older person instead of a 22 year old idealist or a self-serving creep of a CEO.
On the day, [the last day of her 6 month probationary period] she was stabbed to death 35 times with four kitchen knives and a pair of scissors, Ashleigh had been delivering a letter from the Mental Health Matters charity over debts he owed. It is believed he launched into the ferocious stabbing at the ground-floor flat, in Eighth Avenue, Heaton, after Ashleigh showed him the letter on May 19, 2006.
Dixon’s treatment and the warning signs – including the fact he had refused to take mediation [sic] were outlined in a independent psychiatric report commissioned by his defence team. He had attacked his parents with a hammer and tried to break into Buckingham Palace, claiming he was the King of England and threatening to kill the Queen.
Dixon, 35, was a dangerous offender who had not been referred to the panel of experts under the multi-agency public protection arrangements, while he was living in the community. Ashleigh’s parents said she was as unaware – as they were – about his violent past and growing unstable condition. Had they known, they would not have allowed her to carry on seeing him alone...
Chronicle Live.
I know it is irrational, but I'm even more angry that she was so very beautiful.
@WOAR Northern Rock - AFAICS all that has changed is that the government is now a major shareholder and when was the last time that any majority shareholder in any large enterprise , let alone the government, took a blind bit of notice of how it was being run, apart from keeping an eagle eye on the share price?
As for the behaviour of the CEO, this is so run-of-the-mill these days that only the opposite is newsworthy.
Picking up on the Northern Rock thread, they have form for this, they have been making smallish donation to a lot of fakecharities for a long time to keep the government sweet (long before they were nationalised).
The only one I can spot off hand (by searching my own blog) is MIND, see here but there are loads more.
Oh yes - nice little earner there.
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