Moving from institutions to independent living

Every person has the right to live independently, where they choose and with the people they choose. Some disabled people need support to do this, and they have the right to access local support which gives them choice and control in their lives.

For some people with learning disabilities and/or autistic people in Scotland, choices that allow them to live in their community are not available. Instead, they may end up having to move far away from home to receive support or be admitted to hospital. It can take a long time for people to get out of hospital again.

When people are forced to live in places where they do not have choice and control over their lives, this is called institutionalisation.

The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) protects disabled people's rights. CRPD says that institutionalisation should be replaced by personalised support in the community, chosen by the people who need it. The Scottish Government have ratified this Treaty, which means that they must take action to make this happen for disabled people in Scotland.

In the 1990s, the Scottish Government decided that all large institutions for people with learning disabilities/autism would be closed, and that people would be supported to live in their own communities. Thirty years later, we see that many people are back in hospital because their local support has broken down or is not available.

In 2018, the Scottish Government made a new plan to make a real change to the lives of people with learning disabilities and/or autistic people who are living in institutions that they should not be in. This plan is called Coming Home. The plan had a goal to do this by March 2024.

We are checking whether the Coming Home plan is making a difference to disabled people’s human rights. We are using human rights measurement, which is a way of checking how well human rights are happening in real life. It takes the ideas of human rights and turns them into things we can count or look for. It shows what is being done and what is not being done.

We will do this in two ways:

Dark circle with a yellow treaty

Dark circle with yellow people in a group

Research report

We are carrying out research on the right to independent living (Article 19 CRPD) using human rights indicators to measure progress. We will publish the report (including an Easy Read version) in due course.

Participation Project

In February 2024, we invited applications from human rights defenders for 5 paid volunteer roles to join our Measuring Change participation project and create tools for people with learning disabilities, autistic people and people who support them.

The group are creating two tools:

An online booklet which explains how to measure progress in moving away from institutions using human rights indicators.
A video of the human rights defenders sharing their experiences of institutionalisation and what action they would like to see.