About

Working for change with people with learning disabilities and autistic people at risk of long-term exclusion from their communities.

Who we are

We are a Wales-based alliance of individuals and organisations with three aims:

Bringing people back home from long-term placements in hospitals and other institutions.

Improving local services to prevent people from being sent away in the first place.

Promoting people’s right to choice and control over their life, accommodation and support.

Our skills and experience include housing, advocacy, health, social care, commissioning, delivery and lived experience.

The problems with long-stay hospitalisation for people with learning disabilities were identified as far back as the 1970s.
Placing vulnerable adults in hospitals and care homes for years on end, far away from their families and communities, usually has a detrimental effect on them, and their families.
Regular scandals have shown that people living in these places are at risk of abuse and neglect.
Families have described their sons and daughters as having their lives stolen.
The overall cost is much higher than the cost of providing good local services.

People can fall in between systems and there isn’t a seamless transition through services.
We need much more joined-up planning and funding across education, health, care and housing.
The local community-based infrastructure is not consistent across Wales and needs to be agreed and reinvigorated.

But there’s a lot of goodwill and commitment.

Wales has a great track record of supporting people with learning disabilities to enjoy good lives in their local communities.

From the 1980s onwards, we pioneered the replacement of hospitals with local community-based infrastructures:
- Multidisciplinary teams – coordinated around individual plans.
- Help for families – including breaks.
- Person-centred care and support:
  - For a good home life.
  - For valued day-time activities.
- Access to housing locally including specialist adapted properties where required.
- Crisis intervention services.
- A workforce with positive behaviour support skills and autism awareness.
- Wales-based not-for-profit providers.
We have success stories across Wales showing examples of how to bring people home, and prevent them from being sent away.
We need to collaborate across sectors and across Wales to spend existing funding on the right things.