Clause 40
Mental Health Bill [Lords]
11:00 am
Tim Loughton (Shadow Minister (Children), Health; East Worthing and Shoreham, Conservative)
New clause 17 has a little more detail than the last amendment and deals with the criminal justice system and the duty to transfer prisoners. Its purpose is to place duties on the Home Secretary about referral of people in the criminal justice system to a hospital environment.
Section 47 of the Mental Health Act 1983 allows the Home Secretary to order the transfer of a sentenced prisoner to hospital. Any such decision is made by the Home Secretary, based on reports from two doctors. We are concerned that prisoners with mental health problems are still not getting the specialist medical treatment they need. We are all only too well aware of the enormous problems with mental illness among the growing——and record——prison population. The hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) responded to a question about the state of mental illness in our prisons just over a year ago, when she was the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Home Office. She referred to what she termed the most comprehensive national assessment to estimate the incidence of metal illness in prison, published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in 1997. The survey indicated that 90 per cent. of prisoners have at least one mental health disorder, including personality disorder, psychosis, neurosis, alcohol misuse and drug dependence. The majority of that number have common mental health problems, such as depression and anxiety, much of which may be related to their imprisonment rather than being a contributing factor to it.
A smaller, but again much larger than average, proportion of those people have more severe problems, such as schizophrenia or some form of personality disorder. We have discussed personality disorder problems and I mentioned the dangerous severe personality disorder prison population. I know some of the experiments that are going on in the pilot scheme in Broadmoor, which I visited, where prisoners with severe personality disorder have been transferred for a different sort of treatment and confinement.
Those figures are slightly out of date but none of us would expect there to have been a drastic improvement in the mental health state of the prison population. The annual report of the chief inspector of prisons in 2002-03 estimated that 41 per cent. of prisoners in health care centres should have been in secure NHS accommodation. It was discovered in 2004 that, at any one time, at least 40 prisoners assessed as needing a transfer to hospital had been waiting over three months for it to take place.
There is a large divide between the health care that individuals can receive in the community and what can be achieved in the prisons, owing to the difference in priority and limited resources. Surely, prisons are not the place for people with serious mental health problems as they cannot provide appropriate levels of care. I know other hon. Members have raised the subject on the Floor of the House. My hon. Friend the Member for Wealden (Charles Hendry) introduced a private Member’s Bill last year on the mental health of the prison population. Many members of the Mental Health Alliance are concerned that section 47 of the 1983 Act has not proved to be an effective mechanism for transferring prisoners with mental health problems to a hospital for specialist care.
In line with the recommendation of the joint parliamentary scrutiny committee, many people believe that, where two responsible clinicians agree that the transfer to a hospital is needed, the Home Secretary should be under a duty to order his or her transfer. That may help with the burgeoning prison population. Given that the prison population has gone over 80,000 and the Government and Home Secretary are now having to look at emergency provisions such as floating prisons and so forth, taking some of those people for whom it would be more appropriate to be in some form of mental health accommodation out of the prison population could come as something of a bonus to the Home Secretary, whoever he or she may be in a few weeks’ time.