The case of Sir Ranulph Fiennes: an expert view

Putting on my hat as a frontline social worker, what's in the public domain is genuinely alarming. 

Care Inspectorate Wales apparently told a care home in January that Sir Ranulph Fiennes was being deprived of his liberty unlawfully. 

A care home owner reportedly raised concerns about medication and an incomplete end of life document. 

Reports describe twelve contacts across three police forces, social services approached across four areas on at least eight occasions, people asked to sign non disclosures, on one occasion Sir Ranulph being moved under a pseudonym, and more than a year of written approaches to the Office of the Public Guardian. 

Some family members have now launched a fundraiser to bring a legal challenge to the power of attorney through the Court of Protection. 

And in everything that's been reported, one thing is conspicuously absent: Sir Ranulph’s own account. 

Not his wishes, not his preferences, not a single recent record of what he has actually said he wants. His voice does not appear anywhere in the public reporting. 

But here's where I want to take a step back for a moment. 

When concerns arrive in fragments, touched by different people and different agencies at different times, several things sit alongside each other that are easy to lose in a headline. 

There's data protection, which rightly limits what any one body can share with another and what any of us, reading from outside, can ever see. 

There's Sir Ranulph's own public life, and the fact that he chose this attorney at a time when he had every capacity to choose someone else. 

There's his condition, and his rights under the Mental Capacity Act, which exist regardless of how alarming a situation looks from the outside. 

And there's the family's own account, which for all we know may reflect a genuine, if difficult, attempt to protect him from people they believe mean to exploit him.

It is very easy, reading the public reporting to arrive at a verdict. But I don't think we're entitled to one. 

Take the moves themselves. Reported without explanation, three homes in three regions look like instability imposed on him.

But we don't know what was behind them. Could a move have followed a safeguarding concern of its own, one we're simply not privy to, a response to something that happened in a previous home rather than a cause of harm in itself? 

Or could it be almost the opposite: that he once told his LPA he wanted to live out his days away from the public eye, in something close to solitude, and that what may look to his friends like isolation is someone trying, however clumsily, to honour an instruction he actually gave, where a constant stream of visitors was never his idea of peace. 

I don't know which, if either, is closer to true. That's exactly the point. Both are entirely plausible from where we're standing, and they would mean very different things. 

Here's what I mean about the limits of judging this from outside more broadly. 

A safeguarding enquiry under Section 42 of the Care Act asks three things: does the person have care and support needs, are they experiencing or at risk of abuse or neglect, and are they unable to protect themselves as a result of those needs. 

But the law also requires that any enquiry makes safeguarding personal, meaning the person's own wishes and feelings sit at the centre of the outcome, in this case through his LPA, not just the professional's assessment of risk. 

If any of the reported referrals were properly investigated, that reflection on his wishes would have formed part of the outcome, an outcome none of us can see. So although the public picture looks like repeated failure to act, the truth is we don't have access to what any enquiry actually found, because that information is rightly held on a need to know basis. So it’s almost impossible from here to know. 

That's not the same as saying nothing went wrong. I think there are always lessons to learn, whatever the full picture turns out to be. 

For me, the question I’m mulling over is a narrower one than "did the system fail him."

It's more “if this had stopped at my own desk, what information, public or otherwise, would I have needed to make the right call?” 

Would I have made the same decisions as whoever actually held this? 

Would the outcome for him have been any different? 

And the uncomfortable truth is that without knowing the exact details, which I may never know, it could be too late by the time any of us finds out. 

Which leaves me with a bigger question. 

Is there a version of a system that can look at concerns like this in aggregate, studying the whole pattern rather than 29 separate fragments, while still being properly privy to the details the rest of us are rightly kept from, because of data protection? 

What would a function like that actually need? What values would the people doing it have to hold, so that aggregation didn't become a licence to override someone's own choices the moment they looked unwise from outside, including, maybe, a genuine choice to be left alone? 

And, most importantly, what powers would they need to hold, to make a real difference for a vulnerable person, without becoming exactly the kind of overriding authority the Mental Capacity Act was built to guard against? 

I don't have a confident answer. But I don't think Sir Ranulph Fiennes' case is really about any one failure. 

It's about whether fragments, however many of them there are, can ever add up to the full picture on their own, or whether that only happens when somebody is finally allowed to hold all of it at once, Sir Ranulph’s voice included, or whether we have to wait for a Serious Case Review before we get lessons to learn.

Michelle Dami-Johnson is adult social care lead. She has experience of managing some of the most complex care cases in the UK, including ones that have crossed the desk of the health and social care secretary.