Britain’s sordid human rights scandal

Published by The i paper (25th March, 2024)

During my journalistic career I have spoken to traumatised people around the world suffering terrible consequences of war, earthquakes and torture. Yet one of the most disturbing interviews I conducted was six years ago with a friendly mother of four children from Bristol called Adele Green, who detailed the barbaric treatment of her son by a mental health charity operating under the wing of the sacred National Health Service.

She told me the heart-breaking story of how a few years before, her son Eddie, a 13-year-old boy who loved bad jokes, dancing and sport, was stuck into a small padded solitary cell without windows, forced to sleep on a plastic mattress, use a bowl for his toilet and handed food through a hatch to eat on the floor.

Sometimes Eddie was seen as such a danger that he was handcuffed. “You would have thought he was Hannibal Lecter,” said Adele, making a comparison echoed by two other parents with children held in this state-funded hellhole. She was allowed to visit her son one month after she consented to his sectioning on expert advice – and found her beanpole of a boy turned into a bloated wreck, barely able to lift his head due to powerful sedatives and with bruises on his body. “My life has never been the same from that moment,” said Adele. “I felt I had failed my child.”

Her words chilled me. For Eddie simply had autism and – like my own daughter – learning disabilities. But he had joined the ranks of those victims of a floundering “care” system in a country that frequently treats such people worse than its most violent criminals. And that dignified mother, suffering so much pain, drove home to me the scale of a grotesque human rights scandal taking place under our noses in Britain due to the dereliction of duty by doctors, failures of local authority officials and health commissioners, and disturbing complacency of politicians who emote but fail to take action to end these horrors.

There have been scores of damning inquiries, devastating reports and disturbing media revelations, dating back to the BBC’s expose of abuse at Winterbourne View hospital in 2011 that led to promises to transform care. Yet last week, an ITV and Mencap investigation found the NHS blowing £534m a year on these incarcerations – and much of this cash goes to dreadful private providers. A recent inquiry led by Baroness Hollins condemned systemic failures that left dozens of citizens stuck in solitary cells for up to 20 years, saying people with autism and learning disabilities are “warehoused” in unsuitable psychiatric wards despite repeated pledges to stop such practices. “These continual reviews act as delaying tactics whilst people continue to suffer,” said Alicia Wood, who assisted the inquiry.

This week will mark another broken promise in this sordid saga of state-sanctioned inhumanity. Five years ago the government-backed NHS long-term plan stated that by the end of this month it would more than halve the number of people with autism and learning disabilities detained in mental health hospitals from the 2,900 citizens held in 2015. Two years ago, ministers re-affirmed this pledge. Yet the latest NHS figures disclose 2,045 detentions. And the Government has shelved a draft reform to ditch the anachronistic mental health law defining autism and learning disabilities as mental health conditions, making it easier to despatch them into these miserable places in breach of their manifesto.

This callous “treatment” in secure hospitals often only intensifies mental distress for such patients while causing immense pain for their families. Now campaigners are calling on Victoria Atkins – the inconspicuous sixth Health and Social Care secretary since 2021 – to use new powers granted by an act passed last year to order NHS England to reduce these detentions and improve community support. “It does not need to be this way,” said Jonathan Senker, chief executive of patient advocacy group VoiceAbility. “What we need is the political will and accountability at the highest level to make a sustained difference.”

This makes sense – although pressure should be backed by sanctions for sluggish local health commissioners, who hold purse strings but are never held accountable. It would be good to believe this move might be supported by Rishi Sunak, given his laudable promotion of accessible toilets in public places for people with profound disabilities. And that his Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, longest-serving health secretary in British history, could find any necessary short-term cash following his calls to end this “national shame” and demands for “radical change” in care for people with autism and learning disabilities. There are, after all, potential long-term savings.

Yet these abuses are just one part of a story of shameful state failure. Many of the patients moved out of hospitals are simply placed in mini-institutions masquerading as supported living, although there is much evidence of people with highly-complex needs thriving in communities with correct support. The local government funding crisis makes support and respite care even harder to access. Community provision for autistic people in particular has deteriorated to dangerously-low levels. All this underlines how citizens with autism and/or learning disabilities are disempowered and ignored in the impassioned diversity debates.

Before writing this article, I spoke again to Adele. Her son is now a man of 24 who has spent almost half his life locked up while his family fights for his freedom. He is still shunted around secure psychiatric hospitals, held for long stretches in solitary confinement and – according to one whistleblower – suffered abuse from staff at one unit. His family lives in fear he might try to end his suffering. Yet some custodians have fuelled this devoted mother’s agony by trying to stop her speaking out in public, even to charities and politicians, under threat of cutting off contact. And in one more cruel twist, her youngest son is also autistic – coming up to the age when Eddie’s traumas led to incarceration in a country lacking care.

Categorised in: Disability, Health, home page, Public policy, Social care