UK Politics

The NHS is still spectacularly failing to end its shameful institutionalisation of learning disabled and autistic people via the 1983 Mental Health Act (MHA). That is, nearly ten years on from its initial promises to vastly scale back the practice and shift to a model of supported living in the community, it’s still detaining learning disabled and autistic people at an appalling rate.

To make matters worse, learning disabled and autistic people aren’t the only demographic the NHS is detaining at an alarming scale in its inpatient settings. Data obtained by the Canary reveals that, as a group more broadly, the NHS holds disabled people in detention at a significantly higher rate than non-disabled people.

However, there’s another glaring problem too. The data the NHS holds on this is enormously limited. As a result, the figures the Canary obtained are only part of the story. This is because, as it turns out, the NHS actually has no official record of the number of disabled people it holds detained under the MHA.

The latest NHS statistics on detentions continue to evidence the dire persisting institutionalisation of learning disabled and autistic people. But, in 2025, the NHS publishes absolutely no data at all on the number of disabled people it holds sectioned within its estate. In other words, to this day, there’s no way to monitor the use of MHA detentions on disabled people – and that should be a scandal.