New clause 21 - Application to the court for discharge
Mental Capacity Bill
3:30 pm
Ms Rosie Winterton (Minister of State, Department of Health; Doncaster Central, Labour)
As I said, we are moving quickly towards consultation, but with regard to the new clauses tabled by the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton it would be premature at this stage to assume that the safeguards that we might consider necessary would be along the lines of those new clauses. They were drafted in a different era because of the changes that I have outlined, such as those under the Human Rights Act.
When the proposals appeared originally in the draft Mental Health Bill, they were designed to provide additional safeguards for a group of informal patients as a matter of policy. They were not designed to provide procedural safeguards to protect patients from arbitrary deprivation of liberty because, at that time, there was no reason under domestic law to think that such patients were being deprived of their liberty.
For that reason, the proposals deal only with the position of patients who have already been admitted to hospital and do not provide procedures relating to admission itself. Even though they have been revised by the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton, they still would not address such issues in the most effective way. I accept the spirit of the contributions made by members of the Committee and I want to give the assurance that we are consulting as quickly as possible on how we can ensure that procedural safeguards are in place, but at this stage it would be difficult to give an exact date for when we will introduce the new safeguards.