In the early stages of the pandemic, the prime minister talked of “flattening the sombrero” of infection rates. This week’s statistics show that his current policy of limited interventions seems set to deliver – rather appropriately – a dunce’s hat.
Paul Rex South Warnborough, Hampshire
Any decent person will be pleased to see that tougher prison sentences are to be introduced for the offence of hare coursing.
However, the equally heinous crimes of fox hunting, deer hunting or hare hunting with packs of hounds is ignored. This will be because hare coursers annoy landowners and farmers, who regard them as poachers, and so their calls to the police are met with a prompt response, in sharp contrast to reports to the police of illegal hunting by the better heeled cousins of the coursers – and anyway, the landowners are often out with the hunt themselves.
Priti Patel says that illegal hare coursing has “blighted rural communities for too long, resulting in criminal damage, threatening violence and intimidation against farmers and landowners”. Quite correct, but the home secretary makes no mention of the cruelty to the hares, and she also ignores the brutality and mayhem of the numerous illegal hunting packs, who ignore the law with impunity and ride roughshod over anyone who objects to their appalling activities. Perhaps she doesn’t mind threats of violence and intimidation if they are issued by people on horseback wearing hunting uniforms, or by their terrier men riding quad bikes.
Hunting with hounds continues to be given impunity against other offences, such as their dogs worrying sheep, and this antediluvian attitude of the Tory party is deplorable and unforgivable on many levels, the most important being the suffering of the animal victims.
Penny Little Oxfordshire
Hmm, let’s see now. Hare coursing. Nasty lower-class activity. Clearly needs more severe measures to stamp down on it. Fox hunting? Part of our great British heritage, demonstrating glorious and colourful rural traditions. And anyway, we won’t actually let the hounds kill the fox, don’t you know?
No comparison at all, old chap! Constable, arrest those common brutes!
Philip Probert Colwall, Herefordshire
Half a billion pounds per year of public money is being spent on inpatient units for people with a learning disability and autistic people. This money is buying the wrong kind of care in settings where we know people are at an increased risk of abuse and neglect. This must end and instead this valuable public money spent on better care delivered where people live to achieve better outcomes and to give people better lives.
Tireless campaigning by people with a learning disability, autistic people, and families of children and adults shut away in inpatient units has seen the government now commit to publishing an action plan in the first part of 2022, setting out the actions that will be taken across social care, health, housing, and education to meet their latest target of closing 50 per cent of inpatient beds by March 2024.
The government has repeatedly promised to “transform care” for people with a learning disability and autistic people since the Winterbourne View scandal in 2011. Yet this shocking human rights scandal continues – where people with a learning disability and autistic people are being locked away in inpatient mental health units, often for many years – because of a lack of the right community support and not because the person actually needs inpatient mental health care.
Less than two weeks ago, an independent review was published into the death of Clive Treacey, a man with a learning disability who died in an inpatient unit in 2017. This also came after a Safeguarding Adults Review published on 9 September into the deaths of three young adults with a learning disability and/or a diagnosis of autism, between 2018 and 2020 at Cawston Park inpatient unit in Norfolk.
Both these reviews are devastating, shocking and show clearly how the individuals involved have been so fundamentally failed by the system supposed to be caring for them. The recommendations made in these reviews and numerous other reports over the last ten years – including by the Joint Committee on Human Rights (2019) as well as reports by the Health and Care select committee and the review into seclusion chaired by Baroness Hollins both published this summer – are consistent.
They could not emphasise more strongly the need for the development of the right support and services in the community to support individuals with a learning disability and autistic people and their families. The latest NHS data shows there are currently 2,085 people with a learning disability and/or who are autistic in inpatient units, including 200 children. The average length of stay of those currently in units is 5.4 years, with 355 people having been in more than 10 years.
Recent media investigations have shown a significant number have been in for over 20 years, and that 75 people have died in inpatient units since 2015. In 2021 alone we have seen 1,285 admissions of people with a learning disability and/or who are autistic to inpatient units. There have been at least 37,380 incidences of restrictive interventions such as chemical and physical restraint in inpatient units (this is likely to be a huge underestimate due to low reporting from inpatient providers). This cannot continue.
The government’s action plan must be a credible, evidence based, robust and detailed plan which redirects the half a billion pounds currently being spent on the wrong type of care and takes immediate steps to spend it on the right community support to enable people with a learning disability and autistic people to lead fulfilling lives, and to end this scandal once and for all.
Jackie O’Sullivan Executive director, Mencap
Viv Cooper OBE Chief executive, The Challenging Behaviour Foundation
Julie Newcombe Co-founder, Rightful Lives
Caroline Stevens Chief executive, The National Autistic Society
Wendy Burt, Scott Watkin BEM, Jordan Smith Co-chairs members’ representative body, Learning Disability England