Clause 41 - Codes of practice: procedure
Mental Capacity Bill
2:30 pm
Mr Tim Boswell (Shadow Minister, Home Affairs; Daventry, Conservative)
I shall speak briefly to my amendment No. 58, which is grouped with amendment No. 147. I shall not dissent from the comments that have been made about the earlier amendment. We all understand the approximation of amendments, like the approximation of one or two other things that we want to do in this place.
The first part of my amendment speaks for itself, so I will not dwell on it. It is about using sensible alternative formats, and the Minister has already explicitly accepted that as a principle, and to some extent as a practice. However, I do want to speak to the rest of the amendment.
There is an aspect of public policy about which I have an abiding worry. Legislators are interested in passing legislation but they are bad at implementing it—although in one sense, it is not for us to do that. I say this with no disrespect to the current batch of Ministers or to their predecessors of different political parties, but it is much more exciting to legislate and
brings things into being than it is to carry things on. That is one reason why we have moved towards an agency system in many areas, and I realise that the public guardian will operate as an agent.
I will not go into that further, but I want to make the following point: we can all get excited about bringing issues together and debating them, passing law, considering a draft code, consulting on it and putting it in place, and then—like the hen that has laid an egg and goes round the yard clucking—we can all think we have finished the job. In fact we have not finished it, because that is when the really hard work of implementing the code and adapting to changing the entire culture, which Ministers and others have agreed is appropriate, needs to take place. That is also not something we can do on a one-off basis. Having a code is not in itself sufficient to ensure that further down the line people comply with the code and regard it as their natural way of looking at things.
The second half of the amendment is simply intended to ensure that when the Lord Chancellor publishes the codes, mechanisms are put in place to draw them constantly to the attention of people as their family circumstances change—for example, a lasting power of attorney may kick in for the first time and they need to operate it. That is not a difficult thing to ask for, but it is quite a difficult thing for Ministers to achieve. They need to resource it; there are some helpful provisions in respect of the financial effects referred to in the explanatory notes. They also need to ensure that it is kept up to date, and that it is brought to the attention of those who need to know about it. We cannot address that in Committee, but it is an important part of this process.
My amendment is designed to flag that up. Even if Ministers are not minded to accept the text of it, I do not imagine for a moment that they will wish to dissent from its sentiments—and if they do, we should know about it. It would be helpful if the Minister were to give us some idea of how he will meet the objectives.