Just over a week ago, I got a message from a grassroots group in the east of England. “Can you investigate this?” it said. “We’re hitting similar brick walls to the Post Office campaign.”

There was a link to a local ITV report, broadcast two weeks before Christmas. When I watched it, I was dumbfounded, but also aware that it was about a set of very familiar British themes: threadbare public services, a managerial class that seems to constantly resist accountability, thousands of people whose lives have been ruined – and things that should have long since broken into the national conversation but have so far been largely ignored. In this case, what has happened has been doggedly and brilliantly covered in the Eastern Daily Press, and on local broadcast news – but its coverage in national outlets has tended to be muted and sporadic.

What I was sent by the Campaign to Save Mental Health Services in Norfolk and Suffolk was about their calls for a criminal investigation into an apparent scandal that decisively surfaced over the summer, centred on the Norfolk and Suffolk NHS foundation trust (or NSFT), which sees to mental health provision across those two very large English counties. It is centred on the “unexpected” deaths of 8,440 people between April 2019 and October 2022, all of whom were either under the care of the trust, or had been up to six months before they died. The story of the failures that led to that statistic date back at least a decade; the campaign says it amounts to nothing less than “the largest deaths crisis in the history of the NHS”.

The figure of 8,440 was the key finding of a report by the accounting and consultancy firm Grant Thornton – commissioned by the trust, ironically enough, to respond to anxious claims by campaigners, disputed by the trust, that there had been 1,000 unexpected deaths over nine years. There are no consistent national statistics for such deaths, and no universal definition of “unexpected”: in Norfolk and Suffolk, a death will be recorded as such if the person concerned was not identified by NHS staff as critically or terminally ill; the term includes deaths from natural causes as well as suicide, homicide, abuse and neglect. The period in question includes the worst of the pandemic, although the trust’s own annual deaths figures did not reach a peak until 2022-23. But the numbers still seem jaw-dropping: they represent an average of about 45 deaths a week.

To put that in some kind of perspective, earlier reports about the trust’s deaths record........

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