Mental Health Bill [Lords]
10:30 am
Tim Loughton (Shadow Minister (Children), Health; East Worthing and Shoreham, Conservative)
May I reiterate the comments of the Minister in welcoming you, Mr. Cook, and Lady Winterton to the chairmanship of the Committee? As you are aware, Mr. Cook, this is a fairly contentious piece of legislation and we are likely to have a full and frank exchange of views during the debate, which I am sure you are more than familiar with.
May I also reiterate the Minister’s comments about welcoming the fine body of men and women on both sides of the Committee? A great deal of expertise has gone into the Committee, which I am sure will come to the fore. It gives those of us—certainly the Minister, myself and others—who have been working with the Bill for many years something of a strange sense to be here. The Bill has been some eight years in the making. We have had two draft Bills and an excellent pre-legislative scrutiny Committee, which I had the privilege to serve on under Lord Carlile. Now, at last, we have the Bill in front of us in black and white as it continues its progress.
The strong interest that we saw in the Bill on Second Reading is symptomatic of the many people who have an interest in getting the legislation right. On that basis, I am pleased that the Government have given us six sittings in the programme motion. I hope, Mr. Cook, that given the strong issues of principle involved, particularly in those six areas of the Bill that were substantially amended in the House of Lords, you will allow some fairly substantial debates, because those issues remain contentious. The issues are also fundamental to the acceptability of the Bill, not just to Members on either side of the argument here, but to a great many people outside this place.
Given that no fewer than 80 organisations representing mental health professionals, service users and service providers, particularly in the voluntary sector, have formed the extraordinarily close Mental Health Alliance, which has been going for some years and has gone from strength to strength, we will want to probe in Committee to find out why the Government seem to be standing in “splendid isolation”—as my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (John Bercow) described it on Second Reading—and why they appear resolute in overturning the scrutiny and the excellent amendments that improved the Bill during its passage through the House of Lords.
Only today, the British Medical Association issued a press release that stated:
“the mental health Bill will not help vulnerable patients, say doctors.”
We want the Minister to justify why she, her Department and her Government think that the BMA, the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the Law Society, Rethink, Mind, the Sainsbury Centre for MentalHealth, the Royal College of Nursing and assorted other highly reputable organisations, which are often quoted by the Government, are wrong to oppose the way in which the Government are trying to overturn the Lords amendments to the Bill.
We want to have a full debate on six issues: treatability, exemptions from mental disorder, the renewal of detention, age-appropriate treatment, impaired decision making and, perhaps most contentious of all and an area on which we want to spend as much time as possible, community treatment orders. I envisage that we will have some voting action in the process of the Committee as well.
May I put in a plea, Mr. Cook, for the Committee to have every opportunity to scrutinise all the available evidence in the six sittings? You will be aware that the Government controversially published their report on the international experiences of community treatment orders, which the Minister’s own Department had commissioned from the Institute of Psychiatry last year. According to the institute, that report was available in a format that could have been published,at least in interim form, many months before it was,on 7 March. The Government, however, decided to publish that report the day after the House of Lords had finished its proceedings. Yet community treatment orders were a very important part of that debate. My plea is that, now we have had an opportunity to lookat that report, which offers no empirical evidence to justify community treatment orders being introduced, any further evidence that the Government may have commissioned or may be considering that is germane to the Committee’s proceedings should be made available to it at the earliest possible date.
I am particularly alarmed by comments by Labour Members on the recent tragic shootings at Virginia Tech. One right hon. Member who spoke on Second Reading drew a close parallel between what happened in Virginia and what could happen here, subject to our deliberations on the Mental Health Bill. I fundamentally disagree with those implications, which are based on no evidence whatsoever. I know that the Minister’s Department has been in close contact with mental health experts from the university of Virginia school of law and that the Minister’s mental health tsar has invited an eminent professor to meet a group of Members of Parliament on 5 June, but I have not been made aware of anysuch meeting. What happened in Virginia may have implications for our deliberations on the Bill, but if the Government think it relevant to invite an expert, the Committee should be aware of what might come out of that meeting. We need to have that information sooner rather than later.
On a general point, I hope that other evidence that will be useful in our deliberations will not come out when it is too late. We all want a Mental Health Bill that will work. The primary purpose of the Mental Health Bill must be to improve services and safeguards for patients, reduce the stigma of mental disorder and ensure that the public are protected. That was the view of the pre-legislative scrutiny Committee, on which I served, and its report was widely acclaimed by many people. I hope that we can have a full and frank debate on all the evidence available, on the basis that all hon. Members—whatever side of the argument they stand on in relation to the technicalities of certain parts of the Bill—want to achieve a better situation for some of the most vulnerable people in society.
We must also be aware that mental health legislation can contribute to stigma. People suffering from mental illness are some of the greatest victims of stigma in our society, so we must ensure that our deliberations are fully conscious of that and that our final resolutions lead to something that can, at last, help to reduce the stigma from which so many people with mental illness suffer. I hope, therefore, that we can do a great dealof good in producing a piece of legislation fit for the 21st century and that it helps those people that Committee members want to help.