SCOPE says: “Many disabled people have been successfully supported to live independently”.

As someone who volunteered for a while at the Douglas Arter Centre and went on to work with adults with learning disabilities, I remember the very severe level of difficulties that the clients there had.

However, most had some way of expressing approval or the opposite.

I thought that Scope believed in people having choice.

Have the clients and the staff who know them been asked if this closure is what they want?

Do they want to be made to leave their home, their friends, their social life?

Many clients from my day, I believe, still live in or attend the centre which is near the spinal unit's swimming pool and the physiotherapists etc at the hospital.

I think Scope have turned out to be just another load of able bodied people forcing decisions on people ‘for their own good’.

Linda Oubridge, Salisbury