People with Learning Disabilities (Abuse)

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Monday 3rd September 2012 Commons Chamber

[Paul Burstow]

I am sure that Lord Morris would have been following these matters very closely and with great interest, and I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for raising them.

The events at Winterbourne View that the right hon. Gentleman so clearly described were horrifying and depressing. They were horrifying because they so sharply defined everything that is rotten and can go wrong in closed institutions where people are out of sight. What took place at Winterbourne View was criminal. A culture of abuse was allowed to fester and grow undetected and unchecked. The serious case review by Margaret Flynn sets out in great detail the failings of Castlebeck Care Ltd, and it makes grim reading. The right hon. Gentleman reported many of its findings to the House. The events at Winterbourne View were depressing because, as the report by Mencap and the Challenging Behaviour Foundation, “Out of Sight”, reminds us, it is not the first time that closed institutions have let down people with learning disabilities. The right hon. Gentleman highlighted the personal stories that are contained in that important report, and those stories are very telling, with families feeling let down by the system and the sense that the best interests of the individual are not being served and that their views, wishes and feelings were not sought, and if they were sought were not understood.

In October this year, the court will hand down sentences to the 11 members of staff who have pleaded guilty to maltreatment of patients at Winterbourne View hospital. There are no excuses and no mitigating circumstances. What happened was degrading, dehumanising and despicable. I understand that the Crown Prosecution Service will ask the judge to take into account the fact that these are disability hate crimes when determining the sentence of the defendants.

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

Can the Minister inform the House whether the people who behaved in such a sadistic way had, prior to recruitment, shown any evidence of tendencies of this sort? We would usually expect people who go into the caring professions to be empathetic, sympathetic and caring. How come people who gloried in sadism found themselves in such positions?

[Paul Burstow]

That goes to the heart of a number of the points made in the serious case review about the nature of the recruitment processes that were used by Castlebeck and the way in which it then carried on inadequately to train, supervise and monitor the conduct of those staff. I will come back to some of the actions that the Government are taking in that regard to make it much more difficult for that to occur again in future.

Of course, what happened at Winterbourne View came to light only as the result of the actions of the whistleblower, Terry Bryan, and the Panorama programme broadcast by the BBC. I personally thanked Terry for his actions when I spoke to him some months ago about the interim report that we published in June, and I do so again tonight. Thanks to Terry, the Care Quality Commission has changed its systems and set up a dedicated whistleblowing team. An even greater emphasis is being placed on the importance attached to the role of whistleblowers. That is why the Government have introduced a free whistleblowing helpline, not only for NHS staff but, for the first time, for social care staff, so that they can get advice on how to report concerns that they have. There has also been a strengthening of the NHS constitution to make these matters clear to their employers as well.

Terry Bryan blew the whistle on the worst excesses of a wider systemic failure. As I acknowledged in the Department of Health’s interim report in June, the problems revealed at Winterbourne View are more systemic. There has been a tendency when reporting on Winterbourne View to heap much, if not all, of the blame on the CQC. Indeed, the CQC seems to stand as the barrier to everyone else who should be in the dock being criticised, scrutinised and challenged for what went wrong. Although the CQC, rightly and properly, acknowledged its failings and apologised at the time, the issue of staffing and the freeze that this Government introduced on coming into office in May 2010 was specifically lifted for the CQC in October 2010, and there were no restrictions on staff recruitment. If there were failings of recruitment, the CQC would need to answer for them—indeed, it has—before the Health Committee.

Every part of the system—NHS and social care commissioners, providers, regulators and health and care professionals—has a part to play and, indeed, has questions to ask itself about what has passed.