In 1954, the resident population of psychiatric hospital beds peaked at 152 000, and then began to fall with the introduction of welfare benefits and antipsychotic medication, and as part of the wider political and ideological deinstitutionalisation movement that was influential in the United States and Western Europe during the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s. The influential 1954-57 report of the Royal Commission on the law relating to mental illness and mental deficiency (the Percy report), for example, suggested that most mentally ill patients did not need to be admitted as inpatients, but instead could receive outpatient care from GPs or from community health and welfare services (Percy Commission, 1957). The 1980s saw major shifts towards local community care and the decentralisation of inpatient beds to district hospitals under the Thatcher government, which then were consolidated in the 1990s: 1986 saw the first complete closure of a psychiatric hospital, and in 1987 the Audit Commission under the Thatcher government published the report “Making a Reality of Community Care”, which laid out the advantages of community care for mental health disorders. The 1980s also saw the major expansion of community psychiatric nurses, first introduced in the late 1970s.