‘Some children and young people were not afforded any dignity or humanity’, Ruth Innes KC, Senior Counsel to the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry, said that last October, closing the evidence on the institutions where disabled and chronically ill children were sent to live. England and Wales ran institutions of the same kind, and some of the children sent to them are still alive.
Scotland is asking what happened in them. In April, the Inquiry published research it had commissioned into the abuse of disabled children in residential institutions, and the finding was that the evidence barely exists: patterns of failure can be traced across the UK and internationally, but the record is too thin to establish what happened, or to draw the lessons that would protect such children now. England and Wales are not asking.
Phase 9 of the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry’s investigations examined residential care for children and young people with long-term healthcare needs, additional support needs, and disabilities. There were forty-three days of hearings, 133 witnesses, seventeen institutions, with care provided by the National Health Service, local authorities, and voluntary and private bodies. The emergent themes include failures to listen to children, inadequate training, excessive restraint and sedation, and leadership that was ‘autocratic, dysfunctional or absent’. Sixteen volumes of findings have been published. Those relating to Phase 9 are still to come.
Northern Ireland covered comparable ground earlier. The Hart Inquiry’s remit ran from 1922 to 1995 and expressly included hospitals. It produced an apology delivered in the Assembly Chamber in March 2022, and a redress board that had received 5,496 applications by the time it closed to new claims on 2 April 2025. England and Wales have neither asked nor apologised.
The absence is not for want of a subject. Between 1900 and 1950 bovine tuberculosis, contracted from infected milk, killed more than 800,000 people in England and Wales and disabled many more, working-class children disproportionately among them. Those with osteoarticular disease could spend years in orthopaedic institutions, immobilised in plaster, on unheated open-air wards, with parents allowed an hour’s visit once a month. In 1937 a two-and-a-half-year-old boy was taken from his mother’s arms in Sheffield to the King Edward VII Memorial Hospital for Crippled Children in the Rivelin Valley. He spent much of the next five years there. He described the ward in the plainest terms: ‘Hospital life was organised, but crude. There was nothing to soften it. It was lonely, but I couldn’t name the feeling then.’ A nurse had told him that when the hands on the clock reached a certain place, his mother would come. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘she never did.’
He was one of thousands, and his childhood is not the point. The point is that nobody has ever asked, formally, what happened to those children.
Some are still here to say so. Two survivors, both in their eighties, have recently written to me. Bob Shaw spent his childhood hospitalisation at St Cuthbert’s Convalescent Home in Malvern and at St Gerard’s Orthopaedic Hospital in Coleshill, admitted in 1948, just before the founding of the National Health Service. He wrote: ‘I still cannot take it in that this happened to thousands of children. I always thought it was just the hospitals I was in.’ Valerie Muncer, née Poole, was five when she was taken to the Princess Elizabeth Children’s Hospital in Hackney in January 1946. She spent the five years that followed at Hackney, then at Tehidy Sanatorium in Cornwall until 1951, when Tehidy was sold to the NHS, and finally at Falmouth Hospital until she was ten. Writing her own account for her family, she stopped short at what she was recovering: ‘Was this me? This poor child?’ Their institutions differed. The regime did not.
None of this requires hindsight. The Platt Report of 1959 was itself an official acknowledgement that the regime it replaced had harmed children. John Bowlby’s 1951 monograph for the World Health Organization, and the 1952 film A Two-Year-Old Goes to Hospital by James Robertson, a pioneering psychiatric social worker and psychoanalyst who studied childhood separation alongside Bowlby at the Tavistock Clinic, made the case in terms policy-makers understood while children like these were still on the wards. Implementation was glacial: a survey in 1982 still found forty-eight per cent of children’s wards without unrestricted parental access.
England and Wales have examined a version of this problem once. The Ely Hospital Inquiry of 1969, chaired by Geoffrey Howe QC, looked at a long-stay NHS institution in Cardiff whose wards included children, established that isolation from outside scrutiny had allowed harm to persist, and led directly to the Hospital Advisory Service in 1970. That logic was never extended to the orthopaedic and tuberculosis cohort of the pre-antibiotic decades. The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse addressed only sexual abuse. The Cumberlege Review addressed medicines and devices, but its framing of historical harm through acknowledgement rather than criminal fault is the model that fits here. Most of what was done to these children was lawful and medically endorsed. The case for looking is not to apportion blame. It is to recognise and learn.
Pre-NHS institutional records survive unevenly. Some admission registers and annual reports remain. But the clinical record barely exists as a body of material, and what does survive records the treatment rather than the child. A statutory inquiry under the Inquiries Act 2005 needs a minister to initiate it, and members of the pre-Platt cohort are now in their eighties and nineties. That bar may not be cleared in time. Lower ones are within reach. The Health and Social Care Committee could take historical evidence. The action plan for tuberculosis in England expires this year and its successor, for 2026 to 2031, is being drafted now. The Department of Health and Social Care or the UK Health Security Agency could take the opportunity to commission a historical annex to it. Either would begin what Scotland and Northern Ireland have accepted is warranted: securing the records of institutions that no longer exist, gathering the testimony that survives while those who hold it are alive, and acknowledging that these children were the state’s responsibility.
The Sheffield boy was Harry Drabble. He died in 2022, aged eighty-seven. Shortly before his death he was asked whether he wanted his story kept within the family. He replied: ‘Publish.’ He feared that without the evidence of survivors the mistakes of his era would be made again. The question is not whether the country cares. It is whether it will do what Scotland and Northern Ireland have already done.
