Mental Health Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Butler-Sloss and Baroness Barker

Committee stage
Wednesday 22nd January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, having just heard the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, I shall be extremely cautious about what I look at on the internet. I want to say just two or three words. I have experience from my own family and from my friends of two sets of drugs—anti-depressants and Ritalin—and they really should be used a great deal more cautiously.

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, now is not the time to have the extensive debate that the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, has opened up. I said right at the outset that we are talking about legislation that comes into play when a person is going to be detained because they are very ill and at risk of harming themselves or somebody else. But I would say to the noble Baroness that the Wessely review looked at this issue at considerable length, and I was among the Peers who listened to Sir Simon Wessely when he came to present his findings. One thing that has stuck with me is the person who gave evidence to his review who said: “I was very ill. I had to have treatment. Why did it have to feel so awful?”—I am using parliamentary language there. Does the noble Baroness accept that mental health legislation debates such as this might be limited, but they do an important thing in sometimes challenging the prevailing orthodoxy among the professions, and they are an occasion where the experience of patients, which have built up over many years, gets a chance to change practice? That is why we should look at all the amendments in this group, and in particular those of the noble Earl, Lord Howe.

Mental Health Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Butler-Sloss and Baroness Barker

Tuesday 14th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, I thank everybody who has taken part in the debate on this group of amendments. We were, in essence, trying to get answers to the following questions. Who is responsible for drawing up the care plans and for reviewing the care (education) and treatment reviews? Who is responsible for ensuring that what is in those plans is compliant with the law? Who is responsible for making sure that it actually happens? Who is responsible for finding out whether it has not happened? Who carries the can if it has not happened?

At various points in the Minister’s answer, I was quite hopeful, then, towards the end, we went down the slope quite badly, because it turns out that, apparently, duties will not be put on people, and that is highly regrettable. The Minister does not need to explain to the Committee the difference between a statutory code of practice and a statutory instrument; the issue my noble friend was trying to get to is the extent to which Members of this House will see that these plans reflect what was intended in the law and what scope they will have to call it out if they do not.

I am pleased that it will be a statutory code of practice. That is one step up from nothing—it is not great, but it is better. I am also glad that the Minister said that care and treatment plans will be put in regulations. Will those regulations be done under the affirmative or the negative procedure? That is quite important. In light of all our discussions, we in this House should have the chance to examine that at considerable length and, if it is not right, to have a second go at it.

It is always salutary to sit and listen to the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, on the subject on which she is quite rightly famous, not just in the House but outside it. I listened to her strong statement. She will know from other discussions that we have had on the wider subject of health that I have said many times, and I believe it to be true, that we have a health and social care system that is openly predicated on people’s families doing much of the work, and that is never more so than when it comes to discharge. She will have heard me bang on about this before, but I have a considerable degree of concern about what happens to people who do not have families or children. We have never done research on hospital discharge, but I suspect that, if people do not have a relative standing by the bed saying, “No. You are not discharging this person because they are not fit to go home”, they end up being discharged far too early, and I suspect they then go back into hospital as acute admissions a result of that.

That said, I understand what the noble and learned Baroness says about the involvement of parents. However, in 10% of cases, the parent is not the right person. We have heard that in evidence before, which she may recall, where young people who have been subject to mental health treatment have talked about problems within their families. Similarly, people under the Mental Capacity Act have sometimes been the subject of overbearing, overprotective parenting that they have found to be detrimental to them. I am not being anti-parent or asking that parents be excluded. Nobody knows better than the noble and learned Baroness that families are complex, and, as the Minister said, we must make sure that there is the scope to do the right thing for a child.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

The noble Baroness, Lady Barker, is absolutely right. Any amendment I might put forward in future would have to allow for that, as there must be some parents who would not be suitable.