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Adults with Learning Disabilities

My contribution will be brief. This is an interesting and important debate, and I am delighted to follow the hon. Member for South Thanet (Dr. Ladyman), whose work on the issue is of long standing. This debate continues the dialogue that occurred during debate on the Autism Bill on Friday. My first point is that if one steps back 100, 150 or 200 years, one finds a very different social attitude to such matters. Roughly speaking, that attitude was, "Devil take the hindmost". People who could get on did, and those who suffered from one kind of disability or another were simply left out. One thinks of madhouses and all the other ghastly things that went on. Gradually, over a long period, society has come to the view, which was very well expressed in the Disability Discrimination Acts, that the rest of us need to make a set of reasonable adjustments to allow for the conditions in which some people find themselves. The hon. Member for South Thanet, in his remarks and in his fascinating interchange with my hon. Friend the Member for Macclesfield (Sir Nicholas Winterton), brings starkly to light the issues that we now face as the question arises of where reasonable adjustments start and end. My second point, which helps us understand the answer to the first, is that if we are honest with ourselves, we will admit that it is a great deal easier to accept that people who suffer from straightforward physical disabilities should have adjustments made in their favour. It is simply a fact of being human that it is easier to grapple with physical disability than with mental disability of almost any kind. A few years ago, quite a lot of people would have thought it an extraordinary proposition that people with public facilities would have to make adjustments for people with physical disabilities, but we are all completely used to it now. It is just part of the normal run of things. The report and this debate—as well as the Autism Bill, debate on it and various other things that are going on—bring out the fact that we now need to make a further leap and get to the point where we recognise thoroughly that although they are more difficult to deal with emotionally, we must take mental disabilities of various kinds, including learning disabilities, as seriously, openly and comprehensively as we now take physical disabilities as a matter of course. That is a major leap forward for society that we have not yet made fully. My third point is that part of the answer to the first conundrum lies in the recognition of the second point. If we recognise that people who suffer from learning disabilities, autism, Asperger's syndrome and other such conditions have as much right to have adjustments made in their favour as those who suffer from physical disabilities, we are bound to consider both the cases in which society will encounter costs by making those adjustments, as I mentioned in my earlier intervention, and the cases in which costs would be reduced. It is a good indicator of how far we have yet to go before we fulfil the ambitions expressed in the report that the Government—this is not a partisan remark about this Government; it applies to all Governments in recent years—have not even got to the point of seriously examining what savings we could make. To return to my point about the criminal justice system, it is extraordinary what a high proportion of the total costs of the criminal justice system are incurred as a result of the mishandling of things done by people with learning disabilities. That is not the only extraordinary thing. It is at least equally extraordinary that vast numbers of people who suffer from no learning disability—neither autism, Asperger's nor anything of the kind—but who are incapacitated to some degree by drug and alcohol dependencies engage the criminal justice system. It is extraordinary to what extent we do not try to address those issues in rehabilitation. We as a society incur shocking and unnecessary social and economic costs as a result.