THE institutionalised abuse of vulnerable people at Winterbourne View Hospital near Bristol was an isolated incident, South Gloucestershire councillors were told.
They met yesterday to agree a raft of measures to try to make sure such a scandal should never happen again.
An undercover reporter from Panorama filmed adults with learning difficulties being pinned down, doused with water and taunted at the private hospital which was closed down soon after the footage was screened on television last year.
Councillor Terry Walker (Lab, Kings Chase) said he was appalled at the abuse which had been exposed and was worried that experts were now creating a whitewash.
He said a charitable trust had carried out a survey which showed 90 per cent of vulnerable adults in care had been bullied and a third of them suffered bullying every day of the week.
He said it was imperative that councillors were part of the accountability process which made sure these kind of homes were properly run instead of being left entirely to council officers and professionals.
Peter Murphy, chairman of South Gloucestershire's Safeguarding Adult Board and a senior council official, said that after an independent chair was appointed to lead a serious case review of what happened at Winterbourne View, the council commissioned its own independent inquiry.
Mr Murphy said he did not want to minimise the gravity of what happened at Winterbourne View, but the inquiry showed it was an isolated case.
He said: "The vast majority of people involved in that (protection from the safeguarding board) receive a good quality of service from this council and its staff."
He said it was important to look to the future and take steps to make sure similar events never happened again.
To this end, the council has drawn up 11 major steps in its own action plan. This was over and above recommendations which were drawn up in Dr Margaret Flynn's serious case review which was published last week.
The NHS for Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire has drawn up its own measures to tighten procedures.
NHS medical director Andrew Havers said these included generating a culture of reporting incidents, sharing information between organisations, and "triangulation" – using information from different sources to identify patterns.
The national Care Quality Commission reported that the Government has provided an extra £15 million to step up its inspection of care homes and hospitals.
It publishes the results of their inspections and have the powers to close down premises at short notice if necessary.
Councillors insisted the safeguarding board should report back to them on a regular basis and notify them of any "alerts" – recorded incidents at homes and hospitals.
They also instructed officers to write to the health minister urging staff in these institutions to be properly trained.
One of the points which was made during the three and a half hour debate at Kingswood Civic Centre yesterday was that if the victims had been children, then the abuse was unlikely to have happened because they are governed by much stricter controls.
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