The dramatic move follows Mail on Sunday revelations that hundreds of teenagers and adults are being incarcerated – at a cost to the NHS of up to £730,000 a year per person – in appalling conditions, forcibly injected with drug cocktails and stuffed into tiny padded isolation cells.
Harriet Harman, chairman of the influential joint committee on human rights, has invited parents of sectioned teenagers as well as people held against their will to give evidence this week, as part of a wider inquiry into detention.