MANCHESTER’S MENTAL HEALTH CRISIS
We urge members of the public, professionals, service users, relatives/carers, and advocates to sign our open letter below to support our demands.
CHARM has sent this open letter to Cllr Basil Curley and Mayor Andy Burnham
You can add your signature here.
See pdf version here
CHARM Open Letter Mental Health Service Crisis in Manchester
Community for Holistic, Accessible, Rights Based Mental Health (CHARM), 41 Old Birley Street, Hulme, Manchester, M15 5RE charm.mentalhealth@gmail.com
14th August 2025
FAO: Manchester City Health Scrutiny Committee and the Mayor of Greater Manchester
Dear Cllr Basil Curley and Mayor Andy Burnham
We have a mental health scandal on our doorstep—and people are dying.
We call for:
- A halt to GMMH’s restructuring plans in order to consult service users, families and other stakeholders
- A statutory inquiry into the deaths and financial crisis in Manchester’s mental health services
The provider of our mental health services, Greater Manchester Mental Health Trust (GMMH) is in crisis. Its leadership has failed Manchester.
People with mental health problems in Manchester are dying at twice the rate of everywhere else in England. [1]
Others are recipients of neglect and harm, ending up in hospital, in police custody, or involved in tragic and avoidable incidents.
Our city’s most vulnerable residents—those living with serious mental illness—are being abandoned, and failed by the very services meant to protect and support them. These are not isolated mistakes. It is a systemic collapse that is already having devastating consequences for individuals, families, and communities.
Preventable deaths are being hidden, silenced, or glossed over.
GM Integrated Care Partnership have received the largest number of Coroner’s Prevention of Future Death warnings out of any region in the UK. [2]
GMMH and Pennine Care have also both individually received the highest number of PFDs for health trusts.
In Greater Manchester, the proportion of healthcare spend on mental health services remains much lower than the national average, despite higher need.
The service is unsafe.
In 2023 a £97 million annual underinvestment in Greater Manchester mental health services was identified with Manchester. Nothing has been done. (3)
Since GMMH took over the management of services in Manchester in 2017, there has been a rapid deterioration in service provision with a more centralised, less responsive organisation making services remote to the communities they serve.
GMMH have not fought for the rights of vulnerable people in our city to receive a properly funded service. This has been left to frontline workers. The Early Intervention Team in Manchester led a successful industrial action which brought over 1 million pounds of investment to the service. Why couldn’t GMMH senior managers do this for all mental health services?
Thousands of people in urgent need of secondary community mental health care are receiving no care at all. Union investigations show that only 12.5% of people referred to Manchester’s CMHT are assessed and only 8% are offered a service. Some are placed on a list euphemistically called the “Waiting Well Hub”, with no allocated worker, no regular support, and no clinical plan. Others have been discharged altogether — tens of thousands in recent years — regardless of their ongoing risks and needs.
This is not a functioning system—it is abandonment with a paper trail.
Those lucky enough to be accepted into services often find that there is no one to provide the care they were promised. Community Mental Health Teams (CMHTs) are overwhelmed. 78% of people under GMMH care do not have a key worker. The vast majority receive no meaningful support between crises.
Because of this staff have left in droves. Those who stay are overwhelmed and fearful.
And all of this is happening under the leadership of a Trust and commissioning system that continues to deny the scale of the problem, evade scrutiny, and recycle the same ineffective solutions that caused this crisis in the first place.
Whistleblowers are being silenced for trying to expose unsafe practices. The lack of trust in GMMH has led Manchester City Council to take social workers back under their own management.[4]
A Broken Structure Can’t Be Repaired With More of the Same
We have been informed that there are 29 ‘consultations’ taking place at the same time across GMMH. This includes a proposed restructure of the Trust without consultation, which will divide the organisation of the trust along service rather than city wide care groups. Services will be managed across the city region rather than locally and are likely to be less accessible for the public. Services have also been inappropriately fitted together for example with rehabilitation services that should be open, community-based and recovery focused, lumped with forensic services that tends to be focused on risk and coercive practices.
The restructure will further dismantle, downgrade, and relocate services out of reach — without consultation, without clinical consensus, and without care for those left behind. These changes are being pushed through without proper evidence or accountability. Skilled staff are being replaced with unqualified staff, which threatens to dismantle what little effective support remains.
The restructure contradicts the stated aims of new GMMH Care Strategy which asserts a ‘community-first’ approach that will support those with the greatest level of need.
The proposed restructure draws resources away from inner city Manchester and under-served areas and redirects resources elsewhere in the city region, further exacerbating inequality especially for central Manchester.
What is this restructure for? Is it an attempt to cover up the real issues in Central Manchester? Critical data on Central Manchester’s diverse community needs will be compromised.
GMMH – not fit for purpose
GMMH has had no strategic plan to address the specific needs of central Manchester. Manchester has some of the poorest wards in the UK with large ethnic minority communities, refugee communities and a vast transient student population. It has unique needs. Yet Manchester, receives less support and fewer services per capita than other areas in the city region, we are bearing the brunt of failed reforms.
Central Manchester has the highest population density and the greatest mental health need, but has no local crisis provision and disintegrating community teams. People from diverse inner-city communities have been deprived of local services in the name of efficiency. Services have become increasingly inaccessible, unsafe and inequitable.
It is clear that GMMH is no longer fit to lead mental health care in Manchester. The city’s distinct needs, scale, and diversity require focused, locally based leadership that is clinically informed, transparent, and accountable to local communities. We need leadership that cares about the city of Manchester and will fight for the lives of vulnerable people, not for the reputations of those in power.
As citizens of Manchester it is our responsibility to stop the deaths and the suffering of the most vulnerable members of our community.
We would welcome a meeting with yourselves to discuss our concerns and to find a way forward.
We look forward to your early reply
Yours sincerely
Angela Young, Anandi Ramamurthy and Paul Baker
for Communities for Holistic Accessible Rights based Mental Health (CHARM)
[1] https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/health/people-severe-mental-illness-twice-30847278
(2) https://charmmentalhealth.org/6508-2/
Groups:
GM Socialist Health Association
GM Keep our NHS Public
Individuals living, working or studying in Manchester:
Paul Baker CHARM
Anandi Ramamurthy CHARM, UCU
Alison Harris, Alison Harris Psychology
Lisa Crowther
Florence Hill, Unison
Karen Reissmann, GMMH UNISON retired members officer
Sophie Heath, Manchester Metropolitan University
Ose Mark
Andrew Maufe
Danusia Good
Mel Martin
Catherine Fuller
Prof Hel Spandler, University of Central Lancashire
Rachel Hill, KCL
Emma, CHARM
Janet Taylor
Jessica Pons, MBACP, ISPS UK trustee, CHARM member
Ann-Marie Steele, CHARM
Janice Hanson, CHARM
Sarah Roe
John Mulligan, Unite the Union – GMMH branch
Simon Morton
Kristina Dimitrova
Angela Mugan, CHARM
Tony Baldwinson
Annabel Marsh, Community Works
Raymond Graves, CHARM, ISPS
Susan Shaw
George Kalampalikis, GMMH Unison
Andrew Robert John Burns, CHARM
Rachel Tulley, CHARM
Vivien Walsh, Retired Professor
Becky Lupton, Bereaved parent whose daughter died as a result of neglect by GMMH
Elizabeth Tonge
Helen Gleaves
