The latest version of the Learning from Lives and Deaths – People with a Learning Disability and Autistic People (LeDeR) report into the premature deaths of people with learning disabilities was published in July, reporting deaths up to and including 2024.
It might just be me, but I saw this news with deep weariness. The report’s main conclusions, the scrabbling around for examples of health service action in “response” and the ministerial statement that the figures are unacceptable and are being taken seriously could (and have) been said at any time in the past 10 years.
Empty circus
Beyond the LeDeR programme, this empty circus has played out for more than 50 years, as shown by a timeline produced by the Reigniting Debate team, a research and advocacy collaborative led by the University of Bristol (Neglect in the spotlight, Community Living Autumn 2026).
How can we understand this lethal stasis, which we’ve seen play out time and again across so many areas of the lives and deaths of people with learning disabilities?
The frailty and dismantling of the structures of local and national accountability set up by the white paper Valuing People 25 years ago.
The lack of any comprehensive national strategy in England ever since.
The white-hot outrage over Winterbourne View gradually diminishing through a series of ineffectual policy responses into a collective shrug of the shoulders as similar outrages kept on and keep on happening.
The ratcheting up of austerity, as a previously unacceptable service becomes the new luxury living.
The indifference to the lives and deaths of people with learning disabilities during the pandemic.
The increasing invisibility of people with learning disabilities as a group with a right to services within corporate talk of neurodiversity.
This is more than a question of raising awareness, health service improvement, reducing health inequalities and other ways of framing what’s (not) happening (without besmirching the good intentions of health and social care professionals).
Don’t get me wrong – sustained and committed hard work over many years can yield changes but this takes place within an overall context that gives with one hand and takes away with the other.
For example, there is good evidence that the STOMP programme (Stopping Over Medication of People with a learning disability, autism or both) is reducing the number of people with learning disabilities who are prescribed antipsychotics – but they are still 14 times more likely than other people to be prescribed antipsychotics and are increasingly likely to be given antidepressants.
Some worry the term social murder is too upsetting (to whom?), although people with learning disabilities have welcomed its clarity and moral force
Annual health checks for people with learning disabilities are widespread and there is evidence of their health being monitored better but this isn’t following through into better clinical services.
Put plainly
In her recent book, Sara Ryan, Manchester Metropolitan University professor of social care, used a sociological term – social murder – to clearly describe and explain what is happening.
As she summarises in the book: “Social murder happens when you know why people die early and do nothing about it.”
Some people worry that the term social murder is too confrontational or upsetting (to whom?), although the people with learning disabilities I’ve discussed this with have welcomed its clarity and moral force (it’s dying on average 20 years younger than others that’s upsetting, not words that point this out).
Why am I talking about social murder in a column about what research can tell us? Because, as it should do for health and social care professionals and beyond, naming what is happening social murder should be a call for researchers to critically examine ourselves.
Is the research we do complicit in structures and ways of understanding people with learning disabilities that perpetuate social murder? How can researchers do our part to stop social murder? And we ought not to ponder too long – there is urgent work to do.
