Introduction

The Ely Hospital scandal marks a historic moment. It captured public attention in a way that produced a deep and lasting impact. The Inquiry team itself, in the conduct of its business and in the Report that it produced (Report of the Committee of Inquiry, 1969), set the standard for those that were to follow. The impact caused by the publication of the full Report was felt both in the way in which social policy making was conducted and in the development of policy itself. The Report marked the point at which it became established in the public mind that, as Jones and Fowles (1984, p 11) suggest, “institutions … do not cure deviant behaviour, they perpetuate it, gathering marginal people into tightly segregated groups and reinforcing their sense of alienation from the rest of the community”. Yet, Ely marked the start, rather than the end, of an avalanche of scandal in mental health institutions that was to last for nearly 15 years. The purpose of this chapter is to trace the history of mental health policy during this period and onwards to the New Labour government of 1997. This will be history, however, with a particular flavour. The account that follows here concentrates upon the interplay between social policy and scandal, employing three further concepts – scandal inflation, scandal fatigue and policy hegemony – in an attempt to cast fresh light upon the relationship between the two dimensions.

Immediately after Ely

When it became clear that conditions at Ely were already known at the Ministry of Health, Richard Crossman noted in his diaries (1977, p 411) that, “I am pretty sure they have a shrewd idea that there are a great number of unspecified long-stay hospitals with conditions not very different from those at Ely”. Within a very short period of the Report being made public he was to return to the subject again when allegations were made about the treatment of patients at South Ockendon Hospital in Essex: “One mustn't be surprised that if one takes the lid off other evil spirits appear and we should have known after Ely we were bound to have more trouble.