A lonely death on New Year’s Day

Since their mother’s death on New Year’s Day, Kyla and Michaela have been haunted by the thought of wasted time. It’s something that plagues many people after the death of a loved one — the hours spent doing something else, when you could have been with them — but that’s not what they mean. They're talking about the crucial hours in which they believe their 61-year-old mother Veronica Crawford could have been saved, if only those responsible for keeping her safe had done things differently. 

The story they've been telling me is about their mother’s death and, in their minds at least, it is the story of a death foretold. It pivots largely on what was said or not said in a meeting that took place in the depths of winter, just days before Veronica was found dead outside a Nisa convenience shop on Blackstock Road in Gleadless Valley. 

Michaela has her account of what was promised in that meeting, which she believes has been corroborated by a psychiatric nurse who was also in the room. The company in whose care her mother was living — a company that receives millions of pounds a year from the council to look after some of our city’s most vulnerable people — vehemently disagrees. 

A London-based law firm representing Green Bridge, the company in question, says the allegations in this piece should not be published under any circumstances. But the story of Veronica Crawford’s perplexing death on New Year’s Day isn’t purely a personal tragedy, important though that is. It’s also about how Sheffield cares for people who are struggling deeply and who can prove extremely difficult to help. After taking legal advice, we think you should be allowed to read it. 

The meeting 

Veronica grew up in Pitsmoor, the daughter of Jamaican immigrants. Kyla remembers her as “the sweetest, gentlest, most naturally maternal woman,” with “immaculate” music taste — something she credits with inspiring her to become a DJ — and impeccable style. “She always matched her clothes, no matter what.” Given how much of their time together, especially in recent years, was spent trying to get Veronica the support she needed, Kyla only realised how close they truly were while arranging her funeral. “I’ve had friends tell me they’d love for their kids to talk about them this way when they die.” 

Thirty years ago, Veronica was diagnosed with bipolar disorder; she had relied on medication to keep her stable for as long as her eldest daughter can remember. (That’s quite literally true — Kyla’s earliest memory, at age 6, is of sitting next to her mother after she’d taken the first dose, watching her body start to shake.) If she missed even a single tablet, she could rapidly go into “a manic state” and she had been sectioned multiple times. 

“She never harmed others or herself but she smashed her house up,” Kyla says. That’s why, after another breakdown last year, Sheffield City Council referred her to Green Bridge Community Housing, which specialises in looking after people who are especially vulnerable and either homeless or formerly homeless. It’s a form of housing that is supposed to ensure that they get the kind of intensive support that they need. “Our philosophy is to offer engaging, non-judgmental support through the provision of interventions that fulfil not only the needs of the individual, but also their wants and aspirations,” the company says on its website. Elsewhere, it describes Green Bridge as a “bridge to a brighter future”. 

Green Bridge was charging the council for three hours of support a day — including a two-hour visit and multiple phone calls. But by December, just two months after moving into her Green Bridge flat, Veronica’s family say her mental health had deteriorated rapidly. “She would be spiraling and crying down the phone,” Kyla recalls. “She was saying she could hear sirens and she thought they were coming for her.” 

After an incident in which Veronica refused Green Bridge’s staff and didn’t answer her daughters’ calls for two days, making them both fear she was dead, her community psychiatric nurse arranged a meeting on 20th December to discuss how the provider should respond to such crises in future. It was at this meeting that Michaela says she “begged and pleaded” Green Bridge staff to take the situation more seriously. She says she asked them to use their key to enter her mother’s flat in the evening if she stopped responding earlier in the day, and that they agreed. “What I was stressing to them is that they have keys, it’s your property, just go in,” she tells me.

While Veronica’s “licence agreement” with the company stated its staff could enter her flat at any time, with or without notice, a member of Green Bridge staff told Kyla after her mother’s death that their policy was to wait 48 hours without a response before conducting a welfare check. If true, this is clearly too long to wait for someone as vulnerable as Veronica, who the community psychiatric nurse told Green Bridge staff at the meeting could “go from 0 to 100” very rapidly.  

Like Michaela, the psychiatric nurse seems to have left this meeting with the impression that Green Bridge had agreed to enter the flat if calls were missed, although it’s unclear how quickly she believed they had agreed to do so. An NHS spokesperson did not answer our questions about this, but I have listened to a recording of a phonecall call in which Kyla, who didn’t attend the meeting, asks the nurse: 

“From that meeting, did it get agreed that Green Bridge were to enter if any calls were missed?"

The nurse replies: “That was my understanding.” 

Green Bridge’s lawyer categorically denies its staff agreed to conduct a same-day welfare check, saying the company would never have agreed to such a request, as it couldn’t guarantee staff would be available on short notice. The company insists that the only action it promised to take was providing the family with a spare key, which it did, so they could enter Veronica’s flat to check on her instead.

‘Non-engagement is a complex issue’

In just five years, Green Bridge Community Housing has become one of Sheffield’s largest providers of so-called “exempt accommodation”. Started by two Sheffield Hallam graduates in 2018, last year it received over £6.6 million from the council, a large portion of which — although not all — comes from the Department for Work and Pensions. A former Green Bridge employee who left late last year claimed it managed more than 500 Sheffield properties at the time and, given many house multiple tenants, this means there are hundreds — potentially thousands — of people in its care. 

The word “exempt” refers to the fact that tenants of this kind of housing are exempt from the normal cap on housing benefits by virtue of being extremely vulnerable, including people who are homeless, fleeing domestic abuse or suffering from serious mental health issues. It means Green Bridge can be paid large sums of money to house these people, since it offers them much more support than a normal housing benefit claimant would get. 

If someone eligible for housing benefits was renting a room in a shared house on the private market, for example, the council would only pay £80.55 a week towards their rent — a little over £320 a month. When we last reported on Green Bridge, Ali (not his real name), a Yemeni refugee in his 50s, told us the company was charging the council £907 a month for his room in Grimesthorpe.

Green Bridge’s lawyer is keen to point out that their client is a not-for-profit entity. Notably, however, it is a “company limited by guarantee,” rather than a charity. While this still means that its directors cannot profit from the company directly, its articles of association state this money can be used to pay “reasonable and proper rent” for the properties that it uses. As we’ve reported previously, Green Bridge Community Housing rents an unknown number of its hundreds of properties from a for-profit company called Green Bridge Group Ltd, owned by the same two directors and registered at the same address.

When Veronica was entrusted to Green Bridge’s care by the council in October last year, she had spent over a year bouncing between hospital wards, crisis units and supported accommodation that couldn’t cope with her needs. Her daughters believed that she needed to be in something more like a nursing home. In Michaela’s view, the decision to send her to Green Bridge instead must have been made for financial reasons, although Kyla suspects the social care worker was reluctant to send someone around her own age to such a setting. “She kept saying that, if it was her, she’d want some independence,” she says, despite Veronica having never been able to work or live on her own.

Either way, the family felt they had no choice but to accept Green Bridge and moved her in two weeks later. “We just wanted her to be in the right place,” Michaela says. “She’d been passed from pillar to post for years.” When asked by The Tribune why Veronica was referred to Green Bridge, despite her daughters’ concerns, a council spokesperson said it “uses a range of solutions across its own homes and external providers,” which are “selected to, as far as possible, meet the specific needs of individual residents,” although it declined to comment on Veronica’s case.

It’s clear that caring for Veronica was extremely complex, and there’s no suggestion that Green Bridge’s support workers were negligent in how they treated her or that they didn’t try to look after her. But, while the support workers were more than happy to help with things like cooking and cleaning, Veronica’s daughters allege they seemed less clear on how to deal with her bipolar disorder. As Kyla wrote in an email to her mother’s social care worker less than two weeks before her death, her mother’s “constant and specific” mental health needs were “not being met”. 

Green Bridge is adamant its staff made significant efforts — including supporting a referral for specialist treatment — but Kyla insists she was the one who requested a therapy appointment, after she grew frustrated by Green Bridge “umming and aahing” about it. “Kyla had to do everything,” Michaela says. “She was the real carer for my mum.”

The family’s biggest concern was that Veronica eventually began turning Green Bridge staff away or refusing to answer the door — by December, this was an increasingly frequent problem. “Non-engagement is a complex issue,” Green Bridge notes, “and it is widely acknowledged amongst support services as being a fundamental part of working with vulnerable adults”. 

However, both Kyla and her sister point out that their mother found not knowing who was supposed to show up each day frightening. “She must have dealt with nine care workers in two months,” Kyla says. “One time she told me a man had just popped out of a taxi and she wasn’t sure if he was actually a staff member or some randomer. She was scared from then on.” The family requested a rota to put their mother’s mind at ease but say the one Green Bridge eventually provided only named the support worker scheduled for Thursdays and Fridays.

New Year’s Day 

Kyla and Michaela have tried, as best they can, to reconstruct what happened in the final hours of their mother’s life. After speaking to staff from nearby shops, they believe she left her flat on New Year’s Eve and slept in a bus stop overnight — highly unusual for someone who they never remember going out after 6.30pm. “She was out on the streets with fireworks and drunk people,” Michaela says. “She must have been terrified”.

It seems that when Veronica didn’t respond to Green Bridge’s phone calls that evening, no immediate further action was taken, and the daughters were not informed. They were told earlier that day that she’d refused her in-person visit in the morning, requesting staff return at 4pm, but not that the support worker who returned that afternoon received no response. “I could have gone to check on her myself, they just never gave me the opportunity,” Michaela says. “As far as I was aware, everything was ticking along fine and then I go to bed, wake up and she’s missing.” 

At 8.30am on New Year’s Day, a customer came into the Nisa on Blackstock Road and told the shopkeeper, Adam, that someone was lying against the wall outside. Adam remembers that Veronica struggled to walk as he led her under a canopy and out of the rain, although she insisted she was fine. He tried to call someone — she had lost her mobile phone — but Adam would later discover that she’d entered Kyla’s number incorrectly. 

Other than making her the cup of tea she requested, he wasn’t sure what else to do. He’s clearly shaken when he describes all this to me, having never imagined she was on the verge of death. “She was talking normal,” he tells me. “She seemed to be an absolutely normal person.” Adam says he saw other people speaking with Veronica through the window of his shop but he’s the last person her daughters have been able to find that had contact with her. By the time Yorkshire Ambulance Service was called, just before 1pm, she was already dead. A mortician is still working to determine her exact cause of death.

That morning, Green Bridge says a support worker went to visit Veronica’s flat, as scheduled, at 9.30am. When there was no response, they called their manager, who drove over with a key and found the flat empty. Even more concerning was the fact that Veronica’s keys to the flat were on the floor; it appeared she’d posted them through the letterbox when she left. 

By the time this manager told Michaela her mum was missing, it was almost 10.15am. The news sent Michaela into a panic attack that left her unable to drive for a few hours but, as soon as she’d calmed down, she went to look for her mother herself. By the time she arrived outside the Nisa, the first place she thought to look, a police cordon was already in place.

Green Bridge insists that, after “promptly” filing a missing person report at 10.35am, the manager that reported her missing “drove personally around the neighbourhood” looking for her. For whatever reason, he failed to spot her, sitting outside the nearest shops only a minute away from her flat. His search was cut short by the arrival of police officers, who asked him to return to the flat shortly before 11am so they could take his statement, although it’s unclear what he did after this point. Green Bridge adds that it “extended its own search efforts as the day went on to cover local hospitals”.

Michaela believes there were two missed opportunities to save her mother — both on the morning of New Year’s Day, and the evening before, had Green Bridge checked on Veronica, as Michaela believes they promised to do. But she also believes the tragic events of that day were set in motion two months earlier. She argues Green Bridge should have refused to take her mother in the first place, since she feels it was clear that what Veronica needed “was way beyond” what they had agreed with the council to provide. 

When I tell an employee at a local charity that a Green Bridge client recently died on the street, I can hear her sigh on the other end of the line. “I think something like this was bound to happen,” she tells me. “I hate to say it, but it’s true.” It’s been over a year since I first spoke with her, and staff from three other local charities, about their concerns about Green Bridge — concerns they allegedly share with many council officers. “I have heard the council has put a ban on staff referring to Green Bridge,” the charity employee tells me (the council did not respond to this claim). 

Green Bridge’s lawyer argues the company “is not responsible for assessments or allocations (which are the purview of local authorities)” and “agreed only to provide services that are within its capability and resources”. They note the company was never asked by the council to administer Veronica’s medication, something her daughters suggest she needed but that its support workers would be unqualified to do, although they also claim they weren’t aware of any concerns about Veronica’s ability to take her own medication. 

Kyla rejects this idea. “We raised the alarms the entire time,” she tells me. More to the point, even if they hadn’t, her mother’s medical history clearly showed she’d had breakdowns after skipping doses in the recent past.

Green Bridge says that the company “carried out its own internal inquiries” after Veronica’s death and did not find “any material service failures, less still any evidence that its acts or omissions played any role in her death”. It says it is “deeply saddened” by Veronica’s death, but insists it did nothing wrong. “We wish to assure all service users that, while we have found no evidence that this was connected to any deficiency in service delivery, we continue to work with partner agencies to ensure maximum protection for vulnerable residents,” a spokesperson wrote. “Our thoughts are with Veronica’s family at this difficult time.”

But Veronica’s daughters are determined to keep advocating on her behalf. Just days after her funeral, Kyla spoke with Sheffield South East MP Clive Betts, who told The Tribune “there are various questions to answer” about Veronica’s care, which he plans to begin asking once her inquest concludes. “I refuse to let my mum’s death be pushed under the carpet,” Kyla tells me. “They left her to freeze to death on the street.”

If you know more about this story or would like to speak to me, please get in touch.