What this is
A published analysis by Mencap and the Challenging Behaviour Foundation of NHS Digital’s mandatory restrictive practice reporting, drawn from the Mental Health Services Dataset, published on 27 May 2021, ten years after the Panorama programme on Winterbourne View was broadcast.
It is a charity’s reading of official data, not an official statistics release. The two organisations used the reporting that hospitals are required to make, to test whether care had changed in the decade since the abuse at Winterbourne View was exposed.
What it records
According to the charities, at least 102,010 recorded reports of restrictive practices were made between October 2018, when NHS Digital first reported the data, and February 2021. The counts cover physical restraint, chemical restraint and solitary confinement, and the charities say the total is equivalent to one used every 12 minutes.
According to the same analysis, drawn from the Assuring Transformation data, at least 2,040 people were still in mental health hospitals and assessment and treatment units, and there had been 9,490 admissions, about four a day, since the Transforming Care programme began in 2015.
Within that, according to the charities, the inpatient count had fallen from the government’s baseline of 2,890 at the end of March 2015 to 2,040 at the end of April 2021, a 29% reduction. The commitment, according to the same analysis, to close 35 to 50% of beds by March 2019 was missed. More than one in six people then in an inpatient unit had been there since before the abuse at Winterbourne View was exposed, and the average stay for current inpatients was more than five years. Thirteen per cent of inpatient units were rated inadequate, up from 4% the year before.
How to read it
Two rules decide what this can carry.
First, a recorded report is not a person. The total counts instances of a practice, and several interventions can combine into one episode of care, so the total cannot be read as a count of people restrained, which the charities say themselves.
Second, the charities call their own total “the tip of the iceberg”, because the number of hospitals providing data was low even though reporting was mandatory. A floor is not a count. Quoting it as the count does not overstate the practice, but it overstates the certainty, and the charities were careful about the difference.
What the figures do support is the direction test. The inpatient population fell by 29% while admissions continued at about four a day, and restrictive practice reporting ran through a service that was meant to be closing.
Where it stops
England, inpatient mental health and assessment and treatment units for people with a learning disability and/or autism, October 2018 to February 2021. It measures the system Transforming Care was meant to shrink, during the years the programme ran.
The underlying dataset was not examined for this page. The figures are as the charities reported them in their press release, so they are cited as the charities’ reading of the data.
Sources
If you are reviewing how often restraint is used in your service, and what happens after it, our physical interventions training covers positional risk and the monitoring that has to continue after the hold ends.
Reviewed 20 October 2026.