Disabled MP’s passionate call for action over ‘scandal of locked settings’

A disabled Labour MP has delivered a passionate call for action over the number of autistic people and people with learning difficulties who are “imprisoned” in inpatient mental health units.

Jen Craft told a fringe meeting at Labour’s annual party conference in Liverpool that the detention of people in such units for long periods of time in “completely unsuitable” environments was a “national scandal”.

The meeting was held to discuss the detention of autistic people and people with learning difficulties in locked NHS settings.

A report in May found there were still 2,045 such people detained in mental health hospitals at the end of March 2024, just a 30 per cent reduction in nine years.

Craft, who was elected as MP for Thurrock for the first time in July, told the meeting that there was a “real urgency” about the need to “end the scandal of people in locked settings”.

She said: “I think for people that are experiencing this right now, change can’t come soon enough.”

She also pointed to the ongoing impact on a disabled person after they have left a locked unit, because of the damaged trust in services felt by them and their family after such an “incarceration”, which means it is “almost impossible” to recover from such “wrongful imprisonment”.

She said: “How can you, if you’re an individual that has experienced that, how can you trust someone that’s coming in and saying, ‘These are the things you need to do, this is how I’m going to help you’?”

She and others attending the meeting had watched a video of an autistic woman, Bethany, whose past detention in a locked unit has previously been highlighted in the media.

Her dad, Jeremy, says in the video that the family were told that the unit his daughter was going to be placed in would be “therapeutic” and that she would have the chance to take part in “animal therapy, music therapy, drama therapy”.

Instead, she was “tormented” by her surroundings and deliberately behaved in a way that meant she was placed in seclusion.

He said: “The periods of seclusion went from half an hour to an hour to half a day to a day, and eventually they stopped opening the door.”

The room was just 12 feet by 18 feet and had nothing but a mattress on the floor.

Jeremy said the “brutal” conditions led to a “spiral of descent into distress” for his daughter.

He said: “The impact of that is a person is left in a setting that’s distressing them, and it makes them even more ill, so they get more medication.

“Their opportunity to engage in therapy isn’t there, but also, their state of mind doesn’t enable them to engage.”

Craft was visibly distressed by what she saw and heard on the video, and she said she had been “deeply impacted” by the “incredibly powerful” video.

She said she had a disabled child herself and it filled her with “absolute dread” when she heard such stories of parents who have unwittingly sent their child to “a kind of hell” when they thought they were making the best decision for them.

Sir Stephen Timms, minister for social security and disability, said the government’s mental health bill – which is likely to be based on the draft legislation brought forward by the previous Conservative government – would provide “greater choice, autonomy, better rights, and support”.

He said: “We intend to shift the power toward the patient, I think.

“That’s been part of the problem up until now, and it will explicitly limit the scope for detaining people with a learning disability, and with autism.”

He added: “We’ve said that people in the future will only be detained where it’s strictly necessary and where there’s a reasonable prospect of therapeutic benefit from compulsory hospital treatment.”

He read out a briefing from the Department of Health and Social Care, which stated that its proposed reforms to the Mental Health Act would “help ensure people get the support they need in the community, improving care, keeping people out of hospitals.

“The number of people with a learning disability and autistic people in mental health hospitals is unacceptable.

“There are still too many people being inappropriately detained.”

The fringe meeting was hosted by the Voluntary Organisations Disability Group (VODG), whose members are mostly non-disabled-led charities that provide services to disabled people.

Dr Rhidian Hughes, VODG’s chief executive, told the meeting: “The system has been seemingly incapable of making any change at any scale or any meaningful pace.

“And thinking about Beth’s story there, I think it would be hard to imagine any other circumstances in this country where we would tolerate a British citizen being detained indefinitely by the state without trial and where the government has explicitly acknowledged that the conditions for their detention are, for the majority, inappropriate and should be ended.”

Disability News Service had intended to ask what efforts VODG and its members would take to ensure that disabled people’s organisations were right at the centre of campaigning on this issue, but was not chosen to ask a question by the meeting’s chair.

Picture: Jen Craft (second from right) at the fringe meeting

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