Learning Disabilities and Autism: Solitary Confinement in Hospital

Lord Touhig Excerpts

Thursday 23rd November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Touhig (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a vice-president of the National Autistic Society. I join my noble friend in thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, not only for securing this debate but for the commitment and dedication she and her colleagues have put into preparing the report; it is absolutely outstanding. It is a pleasure and an honour to follow my close collaborator on these matters, my noble friend Lady Browning.

“You must meet this young boy who has behavioural problems and is about to go to comprehensive school.” Those were the words of the head of a special school I visited a little while ago. The lad was autistic and, from time to time, had an emotional meltdown that could sometimes be violent and difficult to handle. His first words when I met him were, “You’ve heard I’ve got behavioural problems”. I said, “Yes, I know”. He said, “I’m, working hard to try and cope”. I said that was good. He added, “My brother is the same. He’s five and autistic. I’m helping my mum cope with him. You’ve heard I’m off to comprehensive school”. I wished him good luck. He said, “I’ve decided on my career. I’m going to become a High Court judge. If you come up before me, you’ll get a lenient sentence”.

The point is that the head told me later that this young lad and his family had worked very positively and hard to try to overcome the behavioural problems that he and they were enduring. With the right support and encouragement, that young man has a future. However, that is not so for many children and adults with autism who have been locked up in mental health hospitals, sometimes for years. More than 2,000 are being detained under existing mental health legislation. They are separated from their families, isolated and often held in locked rooms, with their human rights ignored. We in Britain should be ashamed of this injustice.

The Council of Europe is our bulwark in defending human rights across our continent, and I once had the honour of serving as a member of that body. The council has twice in recent years taken a strong stand against the detention of people in mental health institutions, and our Government endorsed that view. Some of us were encouraged when the Government pledged to reduce the number of people with learning disabilities and autism in mental health hospitals by 50% by March next year—my noble friend Lady Browning referred to what Mencap has said about that. That begs the question everyone is asking: why did the Government not include a new mental health Bill in the King’s Speech to put an end to this practice? Families of autistic people are devastated by that failure and are anguished for their children.

A young Japanese boy, Naoki Higashida, wrote a book, The Reason I Jump. In the book there are some 50-plus questions and answers from the point of view of someone who is autistic. Whenever I pick it up, I look at question 21, which was:

“Why don’t you do what you’re told to straight away?”.


This was his answer: “There are times when I can’t do what I want or what I have to. It doesn’t mean I don’t want to do it, I just can’t get it all together somehow. Even performing one straightforward task, I can’t get started as smoothly as you can, so I have to do three things. The first thing I do is I think about what I am going to do. Then I have to visualise how I’m going to do it. Thirdly, I have to encourage myself to get going. How smoothly I can do the job depends on how smoothly the process goes. There are bad times when I can’t even act as I want to. I act badly. And when my body is beyond control—I don’t mean I’m ill or anything like that—it is as if my body belongs to somebody else and I have zero control over it”.

That is an inside view from a young autistic boy. Imagine being autistic and going through this experience when being told to do something immediately, or being detained in solitary confinement in a mental health hospital and being told to do this by a person who perhaps does not understand how difficult it is for you to act to do something they have asked you to do immediately.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, speaks for all of us in the title of the report she wrote, My Heart Breaks—Solitary Confinement in Hospital has no Therapeutic Benefit for People with a Learning Disability and Autistic People. The Minister is highly regarded on all sides of the House—that is genuinely felt by everyone here. All I can say to him is that only His Majesty’s Government have the power to make this change. I can think of no greater act in what is perhaps the last year of this Parliament than to pass legislation that would put an end to this wicked and evil practice.