Clause 68 - Youth rehabilitation order: mental health treatment requirement
Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders bill
6:00 pm

Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith, Labour)

The clause replicates what was in clause 62, but it relates to young people rather than adults. I will endeavour not to repeat the matters that were dealt with in that debate and will adopt the argument made by my hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland.

However, we are concerned about the downgrading of the need for a proper medical assessment. Notwithstanding the difficulties that there are in obtaining the relevant professional advice, the answer is not immediately to say that we will deal with the matter by perhaps looking to alternative medical advice that is not of equal status or standing. I simply say again that if such an approach is right for adults, it is doubly right in the case of children. We think that without the correct degree of medical opinion, the orders may be imposed inappropriately and unhelpful burdens may be placed on the individual. That will fail to contribute towards effective rehabilitation, which, after all, is the objective here.

This is not an issue on which people wish to fall out. I suspect that there is agreement among all Committee members about the need to see the effective, sensitive and appropriate use of mental health treatment. We simply disagree on whether, for reasons of expediency, this is the right approach to take at present. Greater sensitivity is required in the guidance of young people. Young people’s minds are still forming in a way that is far more profound and immediate than adults’. The matter is particularly sensitive for young people who also have mental health difficulties, and it requires a high level of expertise. When such young people have emerged from a difficult phase of development, even in the course of offending behaviour, we owe it to them, and to wider society, to give them the benefit of the doubt and the most thorough and appropriate treatment. I therefore ask Government Members who are not persuaded by my hon. Friend’s arguments against clause 62 carefully to consider clause 68.

Crispin Blunt (Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Prisons and Probation), Justice; Reigate, Conservative)

The aim of the clause, in parallel with matters debated earlier, is to simplify the procedural requirements for a court to impose a mental health requirement as part of a youth rehabilitation order. It achieves that by removing the need for a medical clinician approved for the purposes of section 12 of the Mental Health Act 1983 to carry out the initial mental health assessment.

The clause does not remove the need for any assessment; it merely aligns assessment with what happens in practice. The initial health assessment is carried out by a broad range of child and adolescent mental health services specialists, such as child and adolescent psychiatrists, specialist mental health nurses and child psychologists rather than by senior clinicians, to whom assessments would be restricted if the clause were not passed. Removing the unnecessary current requirement for a section 12-approved medical clinician sign-off will speed up the process and reduce court delay. Where necessary, the CAMHS team will refer complicated and serious cases to an appropriate forensic clinician. We have debated this matter before: it remains the case that the court cannot make a YRO with a mental health requirement unless the young person has expressed a willingness to comply with it. I therefore hope that the Committee will allow the clause to remain part of the Bill.

Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith, Labour)

It will come as no surprise to the Minister that his argument has not persuaded the Opposition, so I shall press the question to a vote.