Care for people with learning disabilities

Following the Winterbourne View scandal in 2011, the Government committed to discharging inpatients with learning difficulties and challenging behaviour back to their homes and communities, where appropriate. However, during the four years since then, children and adults have continued to go into mental health hospitals, and to stay there unnecessarily, because of the lack of community alternatives. The number of people with learning disabilities remaining in hospital has not fallen, and has been broadly stable at around 3,200. We welcome the acknowledgement from NHS England that it was indefensible to make so little progress against the commitment, as a result of which people had been badly let down.

We recognise the complexity of the task in designing and commissioning a model of community based care and we are encouraged by the commitment to set out, within the next six months, a closure programme for large mental health hospitals, and to provide us with a transition plan for people within these hospitals, from 2016–17. It is essential that the patient is at the centre of the redesign. Proper consideration must, therefore, be given not just to building capacity in the community, but also to enshrining in law patients’, and their families’, right to challenge the decisions taken, whether they are about treatment, admission to mental health hospital, or community care services provided. Mindful of the way previous commitments have not been delivered, we urge our successors to examine progress again, in 18 months’ time.