Care Services: Abuse of Learning Disabled

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 13th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington]

My Lords, this is one of those debates where I think that the general element of agreement is going to be overwhelming: we should never have got anywhere near this situation; there were structural problems which were not addressed; and, as has clearly been pointed out, there was also criminal activity. The real question that we face is: how can we minimise the chances of anything like this happening again?

Having said that there is a considerable degree of consensus, looking at exactly what happened at Winterbourne View, we probably had a perfect storm for abuse, as I think it was described in some of the briefing that I received. There was bad management and a disinterested owner, who made no investment, which meant that care workers, who were badly recruited and badly trained, were left to deal with people with what has been called challenging behaviour. To play devil’s advocate for a second, if you meet challenging behaviour—for instance, people who self-harm, are unable to communicate and occasionally lash out through frustration—and you have been trained only in basic restraint, that is what you will use. There is an almost iron inevitability about what will happen unless there is somebody alongside you telling you that there is another way. In this case, such a person was not there. Therefore, it was almost inevitable from the word go that something like this would happen. We should remember that it took less than five years for this culture to be put in place. It was not a slip; it was a fall into very bad practice, and there is no way that we can ever allow it to happen again.

I want to take up a point which my noble friend raised earlier, on the training of staff. The care and support workers at Winterbourne View should have been given better training and—something that is incredibly easy to say but apparently incredibly difficult to do—they should have been told when to call for support. As anyone who has dealt with front-line support in public service will know, getting that message across at any level is difficult.

I have had a discussion with numerous Ministers from numerous parties over many years about many issues relating to people with disabilities. I have pointed out that the people in charge need to be told that the tick-box method does not work. They will need support, and that support will differ as circumstances change. Often, the Minister or senior official has said, “Yes, we’ll do it”, but it does not happen. I have had meetings with Ministers of all Governments and have asked when they are going to implement this. The response has been, “But we said we’ll do it in legislation or in guidance”. However, it does not happen on the ground. That is clearly the situation that we have here. Therefore, we created something that was bound to go wrong—perhaps not as wrong as it did but it was bound to go wrong.

We have to bring about worker registration and make sure that these people have a responsible job where they can develop a career so that they have some stake in it, as well as a stake in making sure that their co-workers are correctly registered. We could talk about whistleblowing here. If we make sure that people have a job where they have a future and a clear duty, the chances of this happening again will go down. We can never totally remove it. Indeed, the idea for better inspections, et cetera, by those higher up are, of course, needed. We can start to take away a part of this cocktail of disaster; we can start to remove it. We can have a group of people who have a stake and who will go back in again.

I do not envy my noble friend her job, but I hope that when she replies she can give us a clear idea of exactly what process we are talking about and where it will be implemented. We must have people who are trained well enough to recognise that they need support and who are willing to ask questions. We must start to work with the situation for those with autism. The noble Baroness, Lady Browning, has been an important part of my secondary education on autism. Once we start working in that field, we need a different approach. There is always a danger that those of us dealing with a disability will think that it is like the disability we have. Probably our problems with bureaucracy are more similar than our actual on-the-ground experience. Unless our front-line workers are better trained and told that it is okay to ask for help and support, such problems will occur again. I hope that my noble friend will say that steps are being taken. We are trying to ensure not that it does not happen again but that the next time it happens we are better able to deal with it because these problems will not go away.