Coroners, courts, regulators and inspectors have recorded what restraint does to the people it is used on. This casebook publishes those records as short, sourced case pages: what happened, what went wrong, and what it means for the people running the service.
Every entry states its confidence, what could not be verified, and where the source runs out. Where a case is still live, we hold it. Where a name cannot be justified, we do not print it. Publications are labelled as publications, because a national count is not an incident.
22 case entries and 8 publications.
A radio under a jumper, and hands instead of words
Ofsted found restraint used for compliance at a secure children's home, including holds applied to move a child out of a room and to retrieve a concealed radio.
PublicationSeven of the ten heaviest PAVA users are youth prisons
The chairs of the prison monitoring boards wrote to the prisons minister about the direction of use of force, and put a number on the youth estate's share…
Seventeen staff in the room, and nobody said stop
Inspectors watched CCTV of a patient kicked and hit during a restraint while colleagues looked on. One of them smiled at the camera.
PublicationSix hundred thousand restraint reports, and not one of them a death
According to Home Office figures, 812,447 use of force reports were recorded in England and Wales in the year to March 2025, 628,307 of them involving a restraint…
PublicationThe only England-wide count of deaths near restraint
Fourteen detained patients died within seven days of restraint for 2024/25. The number is a notification count, not a cause of death, and the difference matters.
A restraint performed as a demonstration
Undercover filming at a secure hospital showed a patient told to lie on the floor so a carer could show a hold to colleagues.
A well-run school, three batteries and fourteen unlawful imprisonments
A former pupil was restrained face down three times and shut in his room with a towel across the doorway. The court found the school outstanding in other…
An 80-year-old with dementia, restrained for a night transfer
An inquest found that an 80-year-old man with dementia died of natural causes significantly contributed to by an inappropriate, lengthy transfer between hospitals.
PublicationSame law, same definitions, a seventeen-fold difference in restraint
Scotland counted 6,263 incidents of physical restraint across children's residential services in 2024. The rate per place, not the total, is the number that teaches.
Shoved into a padded room and left there for hours
CCTV from a London special school showed autistic children restrained by the neck and shut in windowless padded rooms.
A child said they could not breathe, and nobody asked why
An Ofsted inspection found a child held on the floor saying they could not breathe, and a registered manager who did not question it.
Died on his first night after a restraint nobody treated as an emergency
A remand prisoner who had swallowed cocaine was restrained on the floor, seen by a nurse who did not declare a medical emergency, and pronounced dead at 2.13am.
PublicationThe standard a restraint course is judged against
The Restraint Reduction Network Training Standards set what a UK restraint training provider must teach and what it must be able to show. They bind providers; they are…
The chain that stayed on through an endoscopy
A prisoner vomiting blood was escorted to hospital in a chain that came off only when staff told the officers he was dying.
The watcher who was talking
A patient in long-term segregation died while the nurse observing him stood in conversation outside the door.
He called an ambulance for his heart, then said he could not breathe
Andrew McCleary was restrained for eighteen minutes so he could be taken to hospital. A jury found he was unlawfully killed.
Three straps and no shoulder harness
A 76-year-old stroke patient died in the back of an ambulance after the crew left off the harness their own training required.
A school wrote its own policy to authorise a spit hood
An autistic boy with cerebral palsy was spit-hooded, restrained and placed alone in a cupboard-sized room. His claim settled without an admission of liability.
PublicationIf it restricts a person’s movement, it is restraint, whatever it is called
The Equality and Human Rights Commission's framework defines restraint by its effect rather than its name, and sets out the conditions that have to be met before any…
PublicationThe law that defines restraint in mental health units, and stops at recording
The Mental Health Units (Use of Force) Act 2018 puts a statutory definition of restraint into English law and requires providers to name a responsible person, publish a…
Two hours without a check, and nobody started CPR
A woman detained in a private hospital went two hours without the half-hourly observation her care plan required, and six first-aid-trained staff did not attempt resuscitation.
A knee in the back of the neck of a man already in handcuffs
He was handcuffed and leg-strapped, then moved by the neck and pinned with a knee in his neck; he survived, and the officer was found to have committed…
Restraint used to force-feed a care home resident
A care worker bound a woman's arms in a nightie so she could be fed, then went to prison for it.
PublicationThe review that said all restraint can kill
A Home Office review of 1,000-plus police custody deaths concluded that every restraint carries the potential to cause death, and that training was inconsistent across all 43 forces.
Tied into a chair with his own neck tie
An 86-year-old man with dementia was restrained in a care home chair with a neck tie. The conviction that followed was quashed on appeal.
A boy was held in a padded room whose door staff held shut from outside
A court found a residential special school was secluding a severely autistic pupil and using transport holds without a legal footing, and set conditions for both.
Left face down in a locked room for 28 minutes
A student detained under the Mental Health Act was restrained twice in four days, then left face down and unobserved until his heart stopped.
Pinned in a seat before take-off
An Angolan man restrained face down in his aircraft seat said he could not breathe for at least ten minutes before he lost consciousness.
A hold that was banned after he died
A 15-year-old died in a seated restraint at a secure training centre. The technique was suspended afterwards, and two-thirds of the centre's restraints that year were judged potentially…
Held face down for ninety minutes by untrained staff
A care home resident was restrained face down for an hour and a half, released, and found dead in his room.