Clause 24
Mental Health Bill [Lords]
11:30 am
Tim Loughton (Shadow Minister (Children), Health; East Worthing and Shoreham, Conservative)
As I said earlier, this is a very important part of the Bill. It is possibly the one issue that has concerned most people who have taken a close interest in the Bill across all the parties. I pay tribute to the very strong case that has been put to the Committee by YoungMinds. It has not only provided written submissions, but held events in this place at which very brave young people who have been sectioned to adult acute wards have given harrowing testimonies of their experiences. Such testimonies were included in the witness session that we organised two weeks ago. I urge hon. Members to read some of those contributions, which have now been written up; I hope that the document will be distributed to everyone later today.
It is a very frightening experience for a young person to be placed in mental health services. It is particularly frightening to be surrounded by adults who have quite severe problems and, worst of all, to be placed as a young teenage girl in a mixed-sex adult ward for any length of time. It is a practice that I am sure all of us here would agree should not continue. It is entirely unacceptable. It is not helpful to the therapeutic treatment and recovery of the young person. We need to do everything we possibly can to ensure that such practices do not happen in future. That is why Opposition Members believe that we have reached such an important part of this debate. The only way to give a clear signal that this should stop is to make it a statutory requirement within the Bill.
I am pleased that the Minister agrees with the principles set out in the new clause, but she must go further. She must provide a means whereby the intention underlying those principles can be achieved as quickly as possible. Although she tries to give us assurances by saying that she agrees with the principles and is happy to take this away, I must respectfully point out that she has had a lot of time to think about it. The mental health tsar wants to find a non-statutory solution to the problem of inappropriate treatment for young people. But the Government have had nine years to look at this legislation and deal with that problem, and they have failed to deliver the public service agreement for CAMHS for young people.
Despite the reassurances of the Under-Secretary of State for Health, the hon. Member for Bury, South, many of us do not hold out much hope about this practice coming to an end within the next two years. It is unclear to what extent it will be terminated—a point that I shall come to in a minute. Also, I believe that the problem is far worse than the Government admit. The Minister rightly admits that counting bed days is not appropriate and that we should be looking at real people, real patients and real young people’s experiences. The suggestion from the experts and from the young people to whom we have spoken is that the problem is far wider than the Government appreciate. It is also being exacerbated by the current financial problems in mental health services, which yet again are hitting young people’s services disproportionately.
I would be interested the know the outcome of the Minister’s meeting with the Children’s Commissioner for England, who is on record as strongly supporting the clause. The commissioner’s submission to the Committee states:
“The Commissioner welcomes the inclusion of these provisions, in particular the requirement that the services and accommodation must be appropriate to the particular needs of the child.”
The commissioner quotes figures from “Pushed into the Shadows”, a hard-hitting report on the extent of the problem facing us, and refers to the requirements placed on the Government under the United Nations convention on the rights of the child. Referring to article 37(c) of the convention, the commissioner’s submission states:
“States must separate children deprived of their liberty from adults ‘unless it is considered in the child’s best interests not to do so’.”
The Government must make their case regarding the circumstances in which they think that it is in the child’s best interest to be in a mixed-age ward, let alone mixed-sex, other than in the emergency circumstances on which I think we are all agreed. The Minister set a threshold of 48 hours as the period suitable in an emergency, which I mentioned earlier. The burden of proof must be on the Government to show the circumstances in which they think it is appropriate that the practice should be allowed to happen.