Mental Capacity (Amendment) Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Finlay of Llandaff and Lord Cashman

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 15th October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff]

I would like to intervene for a moment as I think this has been a valuable debate, even though short. I shall pick up on the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, on conditions, which are incredibly important. She cited one example, and I return to the musician to whom I referred earlier. Most professional musicians will feel that their instrument is an integral part of their own personality. If they lose speech, they will communicate through their instrument, especially their mood—their feelings, responses and so on—so it is a terrible deprivation of liberty to separate a musician from their instrument.

If the musician plays a trumpet or another loud instrument and they are in a care home, it will be important to find somewhere they can go to play their instrument without disturbing everybody else. It sounds humorous but it is incredibly important to people. I was struck when I visited a care home some time ago and saw a man playing a piano. I thought he was a volunteer brought in to play—beautifully—to people. When he finished playing, I started to engage in conversation with him and it became clear that, while his recall for the symphony he had been playing from memory was superb, he could recall or discuss remarkably little else from which I could gain a modicum of sense. As a result, we had a bizarre conversation, other than about the symphony.

Conditions are absolutely essential. My hope would be that, in the code of practice, we require conditions to be put into the care plan that must be enacted on a daily basis. This should not be just a set of recommendations that could be ignored. My concern is that we link care planning to the delivery of care; that is extremely important.

I was grateful also for the support—albeit somewhat tentative—from the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler. I draw a distinction between the care manager and the care home manager. The care manager should be the person overseeing the direction of care planning; they could be the district nurse for somebody at home, or whoever runs the supported living environment on a day-to-day basis and looks at alterations in the care plan.

In a large care home, the care home manager often manages the building and the staff. They make sure that regulations are maintained and that the lifts work, dealing with all the things that happen on a day-to-day basis, but can have remarkably little contact with individuals. I do not want to sound disrespectful to care home managers when I say that I would envisage their co-ordinating role as much more like that of an administrative secretary, rather than as somebody who gets information directly from the person or the family. However, I would want them to make sure that the family had been consulted, that all the people who cared about the person had been spoken to and that that information was properly documented, with a package being put together for the local authority to inspect. I believe that the local authority will know which care homes on their patch are working well and which need an eye to be kept on them. I think I have half given my response to the Minister’s response.

[Lord Cashman (Lab)]

My Lords, before the Minister gets to his feet, I want to thank the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, for that clarification. Precisely those concerns about the role of the care manager and the care home were put to us when we met 30 or so representatives from the different services. They also dealt with the potential conflict of interest. As was said earlier by the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, there are always conflicts of interest in professional fields. Here, we are dealing with a conflict of interest around someone’s deprivation of their liberty, and we need to get it absolutely right. With that clarification, I say that the amendments make us think again about precisely how we can deal with the backlog and how we can be effective but give the individual the rights and protections they deserve.

Finally, I also thank the Minister for his early intervention and assurances around the inclusion of 16 and 17 year-olds and on the phrase “unsound mind”, which I raised during our first day in Committee. I hope that I have not detained him from his notes.