Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath (Lab)

My Lords, I support Amendments 155 and 156, to which I have added my name. If they were approved, the Care Quality Commission would be required to ensure independent reviews of the suitability of continued segregation, with a particular focus on the potential for community support to be preferable. The amendments would also increase transparency and set minimum standards, both of which I am sure noble Lords will wish to support. When I chaired, from 2017 to 2020, NHS England’s transforming care steering group for children and young people with learning disabilities, autism or mental health problems and challenging behaviour, I heard heartbreaking testimony from parents whose teenage and young adult children were segregated for weeks and months on end, as referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins. For example, I visited a non-NHS provider outside London that had kept one young adult woman—whose story appeared in social media at the time, noble Lords may remember—in segregation, in a room with no window and no natural light, and passed food to her through a hatch. She was completely alone. As I and other noble Lords have already argued, investment in the right type of community support is the only humane way forward. To ensure that proper use is made of this investment, we should send out a clear message that we expect community services to be used wherever possible, rather than segregation. The way to do this is for the Care Quality Commission to oversee a process of independent review in any case of segregation of a young person under 18, anyone with learning disabilities or autism, or anyone whose segregation exceeds 15 days.