Mental hospital exposed by The Independent for treating children ‘like animals’ must not be allowed to reopen

It must have been hellish to have been a patient – a child patient indeed – at the Taplow Manor hospital in Maidenhead. The most serious of the many moral, medical and potentially criminal incidents alleged to have taken place there include the death of a patient and the rape of a child. The latter involving the staff, so the claims state.

During The Independent’s investigation it was found that patients felt they were “treated like animals”, over-medicated and injured during restraint. For years the NHS and regulators ignored multiple warnings and complaints. Staffing, both in quality and quantity, was inadequate. It was a shameful situation that persisted for far too long.

Having been forced to close, the institution plainly needs radical change. That, however, is not necessarily what has transpired. In an insult to those whose lives have been blighted or destroyed by negligence and worse, Taplow Manor is being readied for a reopening within mere months. In a letter to staff, Active Care Group, which which runs the hospital, states: “We will be replacing some of our wards with adult acute services and therefore not closing the hospital. This will mean further training for colleagues as we transition to this new service.”

This may turn out to be an unlikely turnaround in the fortunes of the institution, but the claims by the local union representative are not encouraging: “They have not ensured our members have been provided with the resources and support they needed up to now.”

The Taplow Manor scandal seems to have been a comprehensive failure within the healthcare system, including by the NHS, the CQC regulators and the Department for Health and Social Care. Warnings were ignored; the inquiries were tardy; and action was delayed.

But it has not ended. A loophole in the regulations allows Taplow Manor to get back into the health and social care business – but who can have confidence in the ability of the CQC to ensure that it will not be the scene of some fresh series of scandals? The police investigations into the past are not even complete; there seems undue haste to get the place up and running again.

If the facility is needed for health or social care, in the circumstances it might be better if it was taken over and re-established within an NHS trust. Failed management on the scale of Taplow Manor should have appropriate penalties.

The story is a disturbing as well as a distressing one, as it suggests that the watchdogs haven’t been doing their job. Likewise, if they were not doing so at Taplow and at least one other hospital in the Huntercombe Group, that does not inspire wider confidence that the hundreds of other hospitals in the CQC’s remit are being properly inspected and monitored. Whistleblowers, despite new legislation, still seem poorly protected.

These revelations also come at a time when children’s mental health is becoming a crucial issue. Because of their isolation during the pandemic and the rise of bullying via social media, minors today are suffering as never before in peacetime with their mental resilience. According to the latest report from the Children’s Care Commission, it is teenage girls who are disproportionately succumbing to mental health conditions – 71 per cent of child detentions under the Mental Health Act are female.

It is heartening therefore that the children’s care commissioner herself, Dame Rachel de Souza, says it is “my aim for no child to live in an institution”. She rightly recognises that “these settings struggle to provide the kind of caring, familial environment that children desperately need. And in the last year we have seen that in some cases they can be dangerously unsafe”.

Indeed so, and all the more reason for schools and social workers to intervene at an early stage to avert detention, as the statutory obligations in the new child grooming strategy make clear. But some will need residential care, and it is incumbent upon the CQC to make these institutions, with their disproportionate population of vulnerable young girls, their very highest priority.