Mental Health: Government Responses to Reports

Thursday 21st March 2024 Written Statements

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Maria Caulfield)]

Today the Government have laid before Parliament their response to the Joint Committee on the Draft Mental Health Bill.

The Government would like to thank the Joint Committee on the Draft Mental Health Bill, its Chair Baroness Buscombe, its members from both Houses, and staff, for its careful and considered work scrutinising the draft Bill. We are also grateful to all the stakeholders who gave or provided oral or written evidence, and many experts by experience and members of the public who have so generously given their time.

We have carefully considered the Joint Committee’s report and the Government response addresses each of the Committee’s recommendations in turn. We welcome the Committee’s support for the draft Bill and will consider some amendments to the draft Bill, as well as further steps that can be taken without the need for primary legislation, in response to the Committee’s recommendations.

It remains our intention to bring forward a Mental Health Bill when parliamentary time allows, and the Government continue to take forward non-legislative commitments to improve the care and treatment of people detained under the Act.

We are continuing to pilot models of culturally appropriate advocacy, investing up to £1.5 million to provide tailored support to hundreds of people from ethnic minorities to better understand their rights when they are detained under the Mental Health Act.

NHS England has also launched the patient and carer race equality framework, for all NHS mental health trusts to embed across England. This mandatory framework will support trusts and providers to work with their local communities, patients and carers to agree and implement concrete actions to reduce racial inequalities within their services.

Today I am also announcing the publication of our Government response to the rapid review into data on mental health inpatient settings.

On 23 January 2023, the Government launched a “rapid review” into mental health patient safety, chaired by an independent expert, Dr Geraldine Strathdee.

This review was commissioned in response to significant concerns about the treatment and safety of patients at a number of mental health inpatient settings. It considered how data and information can provide early alerts and be improved to identify risks in order to prevent patient safety incidents and support efforts to improve care in mental health inpatient settings. The review’s report and recommendations were published on 28 June 2023. I would like to thank Dr Geraldine Strathdee for her extensive work and valuable contribution in leading the review.

We have carefully considered the recommendations and have today published the Government response to the report, setting out how we are taking forward each recommendation. There has already been good progress towards implementation of a number of the recommendations and I have established a steering group, co-chaired with an external expert Professor Sir Louis Appleby, to work with healthcare system partners to take forward the key deliverables for each recommendation. We intend to provide an update on progress by July 2024.

The Government response to the review has been published on gov.uk.

[HCWS368]