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The government has rejected three of the key recommendations from the independent inquiry into the death of David Bennett, writes Katie Leason.

 It has failed to take on board the panel’s recommendation that there should be ministerial acknowledgement of institutional racism in mental health services.

It has also rejected the recommendation that patients should never be restrained in a prone position for more than three minutes, and that a national director for mental health and ethnicity should be appointed.

The department of health said that it did not consider the term institutional racism to be useful, and that it preferred instead to talk about “discrimination”.

But Shahid Sardar, liaison officer for mental health charity Mind said that the government should be “perfectly capable” of accepting that there was institutional racism.

“Ministerial acknowledgement would go some way to people being able to draw a line under the current position and say now we can actually deal with the issue,” he said.

Bennett’s sister, Joanna, said that she considered the appointment of a national director to be “essential”, but added that leadership from the top needed to be backed by resources.