On 2 June 2026, Mind, Mencap and the National Autistic Society responded to a Supreme Court ruling by calling it “the biggest rollback of disability rights in a generation”. Most charities speak in cautious, polished wording designed to avoid upsetting the wrong department, so when three major disability and mental health charities use language that strong, it’s worth taking seriously.
The case is about Cheshire West, a 2014 ruling that created a clear test for when someone is being deprived of their liberty. If a person lacked the mental capacity to consent to their care or living arrangements, was under continuous supervision and control, and wasn’t free to leave, the law treated that as a deprivation of liberty. That triggered independent checks, advocacy, review and legal challenge. For people in care homes, supported living, hospitals or other restrictive settings, those safeguards were often the only way anyone outside the placement had to properly examine what was happening. The Supreme Court has now moved away from that framework.
The concern isn’t that every care placement is abusive or that every professional is acting in bad faith. The problem is more basic: when the legal test for restriction becomes harder to trigger, the people living under those restrictions become easier to overlook.
Restriction doesn’t always look like restriction
People tend to imagine liberty being taken away in obvious ways. A locked door, a prison cell, a guard. Sometimes it does look like that, but a lot of restriction is quieter. It can look like someone having no realistic choice over where they live, constant supervision, blanket rules, restricted contact, controlled routines, or being told they’re “not ready” to move somewhere else. It can also look like someone being described as “settled” because they’ve stopped fighting a system they never had the power to change.
Distress doesn’t always appear in ways services understand. Some people shout, panic or try to leave, but others withdraw, freeze or comply because the situation is overwhelming and they don’t have the words, energy or confidence to challenge it. An autistic person can appear calm while being deeply distressed. A person can stop objecting because every previous objection has been treated as behaviour rather than communication. That isn’t consent.
As we’ve written about in the context of transition periods in autism, autistic people don’t always respond to destabilising change in ways services recognise. Some agree to things they don’t really agree with because the pressure of the conversation is too much. Some say yes because saying no requires processing speed, confidence and emotional control they simply don’t have in that moment. Independent safeguards were supposed to account for exactly that gap.
Treating silence as agreement
This ruling creates a serious risk that passivity or lack of visible protest will be given too much weight. The old Cheshire West test didn’t rely on whether someone appeared upset or could explain their objection in the right language. It asked whether they were under continuous supervision and control, and whether they were free to leave. Removing that floor means professional discretion fills the gap, and professional discretion is exactly what tends to go unexamined in closed care environments.
Disabled people are often expected to perform distress in a way that satisfies the observer. If someone’s calm, the problem gets minimised. If they’re visibly distressed, they get labelled difficult, challenging, unstable, non-compliant or lacking insight. Either way, the system writes the story in its own language.
This also connects directly to the Mental Health Act 2025. Removing one obvious route of detention doesn’t remove the wider system’s appetite for control. Informal admission, mental capacity decisions, best interests decisions, supported living restrictions, crisis placements, care plans and risk management processes can all shape a person’s life without ever using the word detention. An autistic person may not be formally detained, but are they free to leave? Can they refuse the placement? Can they challenge the restrictions? If nobody independent is checking the answers, families are left relying on the same system that imposed the restrictions in the first place.
The old system was not perfect
The DoLS system was overloaded, local authorities struggled with backlogs, and paper safeguards didn’t automatically create dignity in real life. But an overloaded safeguard isn’t the same as an unnecessary one. If hundreds of thousands of people needed deprivation of liberty safeguards, maybe the problem wasn’t that the safeguards existed. Maybe the problem is that too many disabled people are living under arrangements that remove basic freedom. Government tends to find that conversation much less appealing than calling the safeguards bureaucracy.
The pattern is familiar across every setting where disabled people interact with institutions. As we’ve covered in the context of reasonable adjustments and employment, disabled people are regularly told their needs have been considered when the decision has already been made. At work it’s business needs. In healthcare it’s clinical judgement. In social care it’s best interests. The question underneath is always the same: is the person being treated as someone with agency, or as an administrative problem to be managed? Legal safeguards force systems to answer that out loud.
The government now needs to issue urgent guidance so that local authorities, providers and families know what happens to existing authorisations and what routes to challenge remain. Rights that can’t be used are decorative.
A disabled person’s right to liberty shouldn’t depend on how loudly they object, whether they can use the right legal words, or whether their distress is legible enough to be taken seriously. Some people will never be able to stand up in a meeting and explain why their life has become too restricted. That’s exactly why safeguards exist. Once disabled people become legally harder to see, they become practically easier to control.
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