Report of the Committee on Mentally Abnormal Offenders.
- Great Britain. Committee on Mentally Abnormal Offenders
- Date:
- 1975
Licence: Open Government Licence
Credit: Report of the Committee on Mentally Abnormal Offenders. Source: Wellcome Collection.
41/352 page 23
![longer-stay homes for people who need support for a longer period, perhaps even indefinitely; group homes, sheltered housing or lodgings) and day centres providing suitable occupations and rehabilitation. In Part V of their Report the Royal Commission of 1954-57 recommended that local authorities should assume responsibility for providing residential accommodation for mentally disordered persons who require some supervision but do not need, or no longer need, hospital in-patient care or treatment; and that there should also be a considerable expansion of the services provided by local authorities for the training and occupation of mentally handicapped people not in hospital who cannot be catered for within the general services for the disabled, and an expansion of social work to support such people and their families. There was a considerable expansion of local authority services during the 1960s and early 1970s, but these are still very far from fully developed.” The health and local authority services need to be closely co-ordinated both at the planning and operational levels. The Joint Consultative Committees established with the reorganisation of the National Health Service will provide a forum for the agreement of joint plans. At the operational level an inter-disciplinary approach is being developed whereby medical, nursing and other health service staff and social workers from the local authority social services department work together in primary care or specialist therapeutic teams. We discuss some of the problems facing local authority social service departments in paragraphs 3.12-3.15. (ii) Children and Young Persons’® 2.35 Juveniles'® who cannot, for whatever reason, look to their parents or guardians for care and control are provided with a wide range of services by local authorities. Of these services, the most important in the present context is residential care. Residential establishments for juveniles in need of care or contro] have been reorganised in pursuance of the Children and Young Persons Act 1969. An integrated system of establishments (“community homes’’) has superseded and absorbed three previously separate systems. Previously, approved schools were set aside for those juveniles who were the subject of an approved school order, remand homes for those awaiting a court appearance or transfer to an approved school, and children’s homes and hostels for those who had been received into local authority care under a “‘fit person” order or, more commonly, without any court order at all. On 1 January 1971, a single form of order—the care order—took the place of orders of committal to an approved school, to a remand home, and to the care of a - local authority as a “‘fit person’’. 2.36 This account concentrates on residential care; but it is important to bear in mind that less than half of the total of some 96,000 juveniles in the care of local authorities in 1974 were in residential institutions, and that many juveniles not in care, and their families, are supervised, guided or assisted in various ways 15 See, for example, Better Services for the Mentally Handicapped (Cmnd. 4683). 16 For the purpose of court proceedings the definition of a child in the Children and Young Persons Act 1969 is someone under the age of 14, a young person someone between 14 and 16. For the purpose of accommodation and certain other specific purposes the statutory definition of a child extends to persons up to the age of eighteen and persons who have attained that age and are the subject of care orders. In this section we use the word “juvenile” to include all children and young persons within the meaning of the Act. 28](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b32220224_0041.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
