Mental Capacity (Amendment) Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Murphy and Baroness Finlay of Llandaff

Ping Pong (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 24th April 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Murphy (CB)]

My Lords, I do not really share the enthusiasm or optimism of the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, although I often shared her views on what needed to be done at earlier stages. We are all rather tired of this Bill and I see nothing to be gained from hindering its passage, but I cannot let it pass without expressing my profound misgivings. We—the Members of this House—have failed to do what we were supposed to do. Our task was to make the deprivation of liberty safeguards—now the “liberty protection safeguards”—more practical, more focused on those at risk, more cost-effective and safer, and we have allowed the Bill to disintegrate into a sprawling, all-encompassing bit of a nightmare. The procedures may be simpler—we have cut out one layer of bureaucracy—but we have allowed these provisions to be extended even further than Cheshire West, even pursuing people in their own homes in a way which I do not think many families will appreciate.

The one thing everyone, including the JCHR, was hoping we would do was to introduce a realistic definition of a deprivation of liberty. In the end, we in this House just copped out. We could not agree; we got into a mess; the lawyers could not agree either; so we have just said, “No, let us put it all in a code of practice”. As many noble Lords will know, I wrote some of the early codes of practice for the Mental Health Acts, and I know that codes of practice suffer from mission creep—they get more and more stuff in which is quite difficult for people outside in practice who will implement it, and do not get updated very regularly because it is difficult to do so. Indeed, if there is no clause in statute, which most codes are fixed around—and there will not be, of course, as is intended—it will have to be arranged around Article 5. That will leave a situation in which the lawyers will have a field day, and in which we will still be waiting for case law to give us some guidance.

Meanwhile, the numbers are going up. My latest count was 140,000—I think the official number a couple of months ago was 125,000. There will be a lot more soon. About a third—it may be even more than that—will be waiting for over a year, and 75% of them are elderly people with dementia, who will probably die before they get their rights looked at. Will it make any difference to them? Generally, it will not make one whit of difference. If we had done our job properly, the numbers would have gone down, and there is a chance that those at greatest risk—for example, people with severe dementia who are kept in locked units, who never see the light of day, and people with severe disabilities in residential care—would have been seen sooner and would have had their care plans addressed in respect of their freedoms.

Meanwhile, these last three years have seen an industry grow up around the implementation of DoLS. It is now called DoLS by everybody out there—I am not sure that most people know what that means. A costly public service has developed which has a life of its own, and which, as we have seen, takes money directly out of care budgets. When Staffordshire quite sensibly tried to call a halt and said, “Hang on a minute, let’s go for the worst cases: those most at risk, those with the most profound disabilities or where there is a disagreement”, somebody complained, and they were told in no uncertain terms by the Local Government Ombudsman to get on with it and to get back to doing everybody. So the waiting list grew yet again. Of course, many other county councils and metropolitan councils were making similar decisions, but they have all had to go back to compiling the waiting list, which grows and grows.

The other people who will love the Bill are the lawyers. Just imagine how you will be able to debate the nuances of Article 5 meanings when the code of practice fails to live up to expectations.

This Bill should be a lesson to us all. It is legislation which arose from a Supreme Court judgment—an impeccable theoretical case, made without any thought to the practicalities that would affect 2 million people. The Law Commission was as tied up in knots as everyone else and could not see a way through. My goodness, it worked long and hard on it in an admirable way, but it could not get beyond the problems of having to satisfy Cheshire West and the Supreme Court’s judgment. This House’s inability to grasp the Bill will not provide any more than a hit-and-run assessment of one patient’s disabilities and whether they are deprived of their liberty. It will not provide any more care for people, and it will be a bit of a disaster.

I have been as guilty as everyone here because I was not here for Report, when perhaps I should have been here to say this more clearly—I am sure that my colleagues quite often feel cross with me when I am not here, and I apologise for that. However, I am not blaming the Ministers either, who have, unfortunately, changed during the passage of the Bill, which has taken a lot longer than it should have done. They have struggled as best they can with a complex, technical Bill; nor am I blaming the team at the Department of Health, because Sharon Egan and her team have been squashed between the lawyers, the DoLS industry, the obvious need to make things viable and less depleting of care budgets, and the impossibility of satisfying everyone.

The only flexibility left—because we will pass the Bill—is that before the Bill is commenced, the Government should pause and do a few more sums; otherwise, we shall be back here in another three years, looking at how we can make this legislation more viable. Many more millions of hours of care staff time will have been wasted in failing to improve the care of mentally incapacitated people. Their rights need protecting, but this Bill will not do it.

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)]

My Lords, I have taken a slightly different view. I declare my interest as chair of the National Mental Capacity Forum, and I am grateful to my leadership group in that forum for their comments, constant advice and constructive criticism. I am also most grateful to the Bill team, the noble Lord, Lord O’Shaughnessy, and the Minister for having listened. We have certainly given the Bill what we could term a bumpy ride. I think that needed to happen and do not apologise for it at all. From what I understand, the way the code of practice is now being developed will result in a far better situation.

Mental Capacity (Amendment) Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Murphy and Baroness Finlay of Llandaff

Committee: 3rd sitting - (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 22nd October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Murphy (CB)]

My Lords, I am the world’s greatest pragmatist in this matter. I am very sympathetic to what the noble Baronesses, Lady Barker and Lady Tyler, are saying. This Bill is by no means perfect. It has huge gaps and we would not have started from here, but the reality is that this Bill will be with us for the rest of the autumn and I believe that Sir Simon Wessely’s report will be submitted to the Government around 12 December, so it is likely to come before Third Reading and before we finish the Bill. We will be able to see if there are great big gaps. I do not think the two things will overlap very much. We might be helped out, particularly on amendments on advanced directives, and in that context we can perhaps make ourselves closer to what Sir Simon Wessely recommends, but I do not think there is anything to address, except that the current Bill is not working. We have all those people waiting for an assessment who will never be assessed. We need some legislation in place. There is some urgency. I know we would like a perfect Bill, but we are not going to get one. What we need is an implementable Bill which makes assessments doable for people who need them and so that we can get some process in place. The Bill is not perfect. We would not start from here, but we have this Bill and we should continue with it.

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)]

I shall continue on the theme that my noble friend Lady Murphy has set out. Last week, I chaired the National Mental Capacity Forum leadership group. One of the people there said that:

“While there was an initial knee-jerk reaction amongst care providers and the local council, if you consider the”.


liberty protection safeguards,

“in more detail you quickly come to understand that it is actually quite an innovative solution”,

because there is such a backlog and so much difficulty in trying to get anything in place.

I am concerned that we are trying to draw clear lines between different types of illnesses and conditions when it is pretty impossible to do so. There are mental health conditions that impair your capacity, even though you may be compliant with treatment, there are physical illnesses that result in impaired capacity, and there are illnesses—Lewy body dementia is one of them—where part of the illness means that you may be a risk to other people. Huntington’s disease is similar and a horrible disease to have. Trying to draw clear lines between those different groups is difficult.

I looked at the amendment and for a definition of “fluctuate” and “short”. I tried to think how I would define “fluctuate” or “short” in a clinical context, and I could not because “short” might be short to some people and long to others and fluctuation can be all kinds of directions and with different degrees of severity. The difficulty we are grappling with here is that we are trying to write something in legislation that will be literally black and white: black words on a white page. The people we are dealing with are incredibly individual and have very different needs. That is why, returning to our previous debate, the stress on wishes and feelings and on consulting people who know the person becomes incredibly important. We will go on to talk about ways that people can call for external scrutiny because, if they care about the person, they need to be able to do that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Murphy]

My Lords, Amendment 84, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, is possibly one of the most important amendments we have tabled to the Bill. It has become so much more important over the last 20 or 30 years to try to encourage people to make decisions in advance about what should happen to them and to encourage them to think about what will happen in the event of things going wrong—to think about things such as lasting powers of attorney and advance decisions on mental health services. I understand that Sir Simon Wessely will recommend some changes that are very similar to this to go into the new mental health legislation. It would be good, bearing in mind our previous discussions, if we could feel confident that the same sort of approach was being taken in this Bill.

Advance decision-making in legislation has proved quite difficult to implement, because you have to have a widespread campaign of understanding how people can make these decisions. It also has to have the individual making the decision accept that things will happen to them that they are not expecting, which is sometimes very difficult. That is why it so difficult to get people to sign up to insurance against long-term care; they simply do not believe that it will ever happen to them. It is very difficult to get these bits of legislation implemented and widespread, but we have to start somewhere. This is such an important piece to try to get into a Bill, to start people thinking about their future and what is acceptable. This would be a very important thing for the Bill.

I would also like to see Amendment 85 implemented. It is something that the Law Commission had in originally. I am not quite sure why it came out. It sort of just disappeared in the transcription somewhere. It is an important safeguard. We tend to forget all those Victorian cases a couple of hundred years ago when people were quite regularly held in circumstances against their wishes and unlawfully deprived of their liberty. It is as well to be reminded that it can, and probably does, still happen quite frequently. To have something on the statute book would be helpful, so I support the two amendments.

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff]

My Lords, I am afraid I will take a different view. Amendment 84 is potentially incredibly dangerous in the context of the Bill. I can understand why people with a mental health disorder who know exactly what is likely to happen to them when they relapse and know what treatment they do and do not want can make an informed decision based on their previous experience of their illness and episodes. Here, however, we are asking people to provide advance consent to their liberty being deprived in a situation that they do not know about and have not experienced. The evidence from advance care planning—I have a recent paper from Ontario—showed that people’s knowledge was very poor. There were decision conflicts and when they were re-interviewed later they had re-evaluated their decisions in the light of further information and as things had moved forwards.

The problem is that the cared-for person’s experience of care is based on human interaction. They cannot predict who will be the carer at some point in the future, nor how that interpersonal chemistry will work. I am concerned that there is a real danger that someone could be locked in to having to live with what they said previously. There is a lot of evidence from the world of care planning that people do change their preferences. Indeed, as an illness progresses, they may change them very radically.

Mental Capacity (Amendment) Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Murphy and Baroness Finlay of Llandaff

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

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff]

My Lords, I have one amendment in this group and I wonder whether the group is focused on lines of answerability. Who is going to be responsible? If the person is in the community in any setting the responsibility will go or should go, as I understand it, to the local authority. If the person is in hospital then it would go to the hospital. However, we have a problem. A lot of people on continuing care funding are in the community. I am concerned that if the authorisation for those people sits with the clinical commissioning group rather than the local authority, we may end up with some people getting lost in the system. The standards and criteria against which the different assessments and processes are benchmarked and what is expected, particularly how the process is monitored, could be unclear. It will be much harder to monitor out in the community than in a hospital or in-patient setting.

Following on from our previous debate, I had a quick look at the requirements to be a best interests assessor. As far as I can see, to enrol on the course you must have had two years’ post-registration experience as an approved mental health professional social worker, registered with the Health and Care Professions Council, or be a nurse, a psychologist or an occupational therapist. The people who potentially will migrate to become approved mental capacity professionals are registered professionals. That is incredibly important and we should not lose that in any aspect of the Bill. If they are registered professionals they have a raft of professional duties that go with that.

This part of the Bill and the process is not terribly clear, and I worry particularly about people on continuing care out in the community, or those who may become self-funders, managing their own budgets for care.

[Baroness Murphy]

My Lords, I added my name to the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly. In view of my previous comments, people may be surprised that I did because it seems to be making life more complicated. In fact, I saw the more professional pre-authorisation process for the smaller group who will eventually be subject to this Act, I hope, as introducing something for the high-risk people who will be assessed by professionals. I like the role of the new AMCP, which sort of takes over from the best interests assessor, because I think it will be a well-qualified group. It would add some solid support if the care home manager’s role is to continue. I saw this, when I first read it, as a good way of providing some pre-authorisation backstop, if you like—a solid foundation on which we would have more confidence that the care manager role could work. I am still anxious about the care management work for all the reasons that the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, mentioned, but this was one way that I saw of adding some professional expertise that would give confidence to the mental capacity community that we were taking this seriously.

Assisted Suicide

Debate between Baroness Murphy and Baroness Finlay of Llandaff

Wednesday 5th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Murphy (CB)]

My Lords, I give my full support to the introductory speech from the noble Baroness, Lady Jay. However, I am abandoning the rest of my speech because I am so cross at what I have heard today, which I know to be totally false and I am tired of listening to it.

First, I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell of Surbiton, that services for terminally ill people have got substantially better over the past five years. There is greater understanding and more talk about the issues surrounding death in hospital. The economic circumstances of this country have not led to greater disadvantage for people who are terminally ill; paradoxically, it has led to an improvement.

I should also like to tell the noble Baronesses, Lady Campbell and Lady Grey-Thompson, that it is impossible to conflate the problems of people who are terminally ill, are already dying and are about to die with those of people who have a chronic long-term disability and are not dying. We must distinguish between these two groups. That is crucial because they are completely and utterly different.

I should also like to say to my two medical colleagues behind me, the noble Baronesses, Lady Finlay and Lady Hollins, that, if their patients do not talk about dying or the wish to die when they are terminally ill, I just do not think they are listening very well.

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff]

My Lords—

[Baroness Murphy]

I am sorry; I have only two minutes. Of course people talk about this. They do not sit there quietly. I read the BMA guidelines again today to make sure that I was up to speed—being a member of the BMA, I would, wouldn’t I?—and I can tell your Lordships that they make it very clear that you must not discuss any of these issues. I believe that the BMA circulated this guidance to everybody today and not just to doctors. Incidentally, we know that the BMA has never asked its members about this—I have never been asked by anybody in the BMA. Of course, it is led by people who are violently opposed to any new policy, so that is hardly surprising.

My time is up but I must express my anger today. I am for the proposals put forward by the noble Baroness, Lady Jay.

Health and Social Care Bill

Debate between Baroness Murphy and Baroness Finlay of Llandaff

Tuesday 13th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Murphy]

My Lords, I wanted to come in on this matter of anti-competitive practices and the role of Monitor in it. I apologise to the Committee if some of these matters have already been covered, but I was unable to be here this morning. However, this seems like an opportunity to speak, as we are discussing Monitor’s role in anti-competitive practice.

I am concerned that we have not yet talked about the quite serious anti-competitive practice that exists in the NHS today, and how damaging it is. As we know, the independent co-operation and competition panel has highlighted a range of tactics that are very common at the moment in the NHS and which go seriously against patients’ interests. We have not sufficiently considered these when we are looking at competition. We tend to think of competition in relation to the independent sector versus the NHS in approaching the provision of services, but in fact it is this anti-competitive practice within the NHS which is so damaging. An example of this is the protection of certain local services against providers for elective operations, and so on.

I can think of an example in my own backyard, at Barts and The London—and this is a very real case. For years and years Barts used the mainstream orthopaedic services to provide local podiatry services, at a very high cost and very anti-competitively against the local community services, which had very skilled podiatrists who were able to do foot operations very cheaply and simply with a much smaller waiting list. Those sorts of anti-competitive practices are rife throughout the NHS, and are against patients’ best interests. It is utterly crucial that this role to reduce as much anti-competitive practice as possible should be watched by Monitor, but we want it to be co-ordinated with its role on integration—there is absolutely no reason why the two things cannot go side by side.

I am sure that we will come on to mergers and acquisitions, but the recent protection of patients and the public—for example, against the merger of two mental health trusts, Norfolk and Waveney, and Suffolk—seems to me to be extremely good judgment about what is likely to be in patients’ best interests. We should remember these matters of anti-competitive practice that are, as I say, rife in the NHS, and we really need to do quite a lot to stamp them out. I hope that the role of Monitor in working on these practices in patients’ best interests will be strongly supported.

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Warner, was most helpful in setting out the criteria with which one would want to look at competition, and emphasising the importance of competition. But there is another area of competition, which is the one that really drives up quality of care: the inherent competitiveness of different clinicians and different clinical services, their desire to have better clinical outcomes than others, and the pressure that they will put on themselves within their own team to achieve better clinical outcomes.

I apologise to the House if I contributed in any way to the confusion over the numbering of the amendments as they have arisen. I would like to address the ones that come after Amendment 266, which will be Amendments 268B and 267C. Amendment 267C was tabled because of the large number of patients with complex clinical conditions.

It is very easy, when we are thinking about tariffs and services, to look almost at discrete nuggets of care, diagnosis and so on. Indeed, Monitor has a requirement in the Bill to seek appropriate advice to effectively discharge its functions in,

“the prevention, diagnosis or treatment of illness, or … the protection or improvement of public health”.

The amendment related to the management of a wide range of complex conditions has been tabled because in complex conditions many situations overlap and cannot be discretely targeted together, nor can they necessarily be unpacked one from another because of their impact on each other. That requires integration of clinical services.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Murphy]

I realise that I have another amendment in this group, and I would have saved the Committee a great deal of disquiet over the numbers if I had spoken to this one in the first place, so my apologies all round. This group of amendments is about how Monitor discharges its functions and what it takes into account. Mine is a probing amendment on whether we have the objectives for Monitor and their number right. Experience from other sectors suggests that if too many policy priorities are set, the regulator can become confused about its primary objectives, which can reduce its effectiveness. I wonder whether we have the clarity of Monitor’s objectives right.

Monitor will find itself in the position of other regulators in having to devise policies, particularly on the tariff, to meet a wide range of objectives over and above its primary duties. The experience of Ofgem, in particular, suggests that the risk might grow over time as the Government seek solutions for new problems as and when they arise. Setting too many policy priorities carries the risk of confusing the regulator about its primary objectives. That might be inevitable, given the complexity of healthcare policy-making, but it means that the accountability of the regulator in discharging those various functions is critical.

For other major economic regulators, the Government have committed themselves to updating the objectives only once in a Parliament and ensuring that objectives are outcome-focused. Monitor's objectives, unusually, will be set in primary legislation. I wonder whether they would be better in secondary guidance, together with a clear process for agreeing changes with the Department of Health, to protect the regulator from political whim. Nevertheless, it has a number of primary duties in Clause 59. In Clause 62 it has to have regard to a number of other matters. Monitor might find it difficult to demonstrate that they are all taken into account when decisions are made, possibly making it open to legal challenge. I wonder whether it is possible to reduce the number of duties.

I have included just one or two as exemplars simply because I think that they duplicate existing duties. In Clause 62(b),

“the desirability of securing continuous improvement in the quality of health care services for the purpose of the NHS”,

which is crucial, duplicates a primary duty in Clause 59(1)(b), so I think it could be removed. Clause 62(c), on,

“the desirability of securing continuous improvement in the efficiency with which health care services are provided for the purposes of the NHS”,

duplicates a duty under Clause 59(1)(a). Surely that could be removed. These are minor, tidying amendments, but if we can clarify for Monitor what its objectives should be, that would be a help to the regulator.

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff]

My Lords, I half spoke previously to the need for Monitor to have regard to complex clinical conditions. I return to that and build on the comments that have just been made, particularly in relation to tariffs.

We are already beginning to see a degree of fragmentation through systems such as “choose and book”. We heard on a previous day in Committee about the problems for patients with various complex conditions, who have to be sent back to their general practitioner to be able to access a different discipline in secondary care and how their care then becomes fragmented. If you are going to provide good integrated care and improve clinical outcomes, you need all the different systems of the patient to be addressed simultaneously—the psychological and welfare areas as well as the different physiological systems that might be affected by a range of pathologies.

I remind the House that it is much easier when people are not terribly ill. When they do become terribly ill, more and more systems fail and become involved: cardiac complications, overwhelming infection, renal failure and potential dialysis might all be involved, and if there has also been trauma with orthopaedics there might be a lot of complex psychological conditions relating to whatever has happened to the person. They all need to come together around that patient. The patient cannot be parcelled off from one service to another or people be brought in sequentially like small aliquots of opinion.

Health and Social Care Bill

Debate between Baroness Murphy and Baroness Finlay of Llandaff

Tuesday 22nd November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff]

My Lords, I have several amendments in this group. Amendment 203A has been spoken to fully by noble friend Lady Hollins, who has supported other amendments in this group. Amendment 135C would require a biannual report by the board to the Secretary of State on what has been done to promote integration. The other amendments are all designed to promote collaboration, decrease duplication and bring together primary and secondary care and public health and the diagnostic services to have better diagnosis and management of disease.

Integrated working allows patients and their carers to benefit from good primary care provided by GPs and others in the team, to have help and support provided by those working in social care, and to access early referral, appropriate investigation and treatment as required from specialist services. Good integrated care needs to see the patients and their experience in the context of their lives, social support, relationships, cultural experience, gender and a range of other factors. Bringing together an integrated social and clinical approach should include holistic plans for diagnosis, treatment, rehabilitation, support and long-term follow-up.

In their report Teams without Walls, the Royal College of Physicians, the Royal College of General Practitioners and the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health highlighted the recommended use of patient pathways as the building blocks for services, with the right balance between prevention, early identification, assessment, intervention and, where necessary, long-term support. They also pointed out that this had implications for commissioners, providers and regulators of services. Multi-professional working with the patient at the centre of everything provides the opportunity for a wide range of professionals, including those outside an organisation, to monitor care delivery and challenge standards. This will help prevent trusts and professionals from becoming insular. Insular practices can result in negative cultures developing and poor standards becoming tolerated.

The clinical commissioning groups have quite a challenge facing them if they are really to commission and develop integrated as opposed to fragmented care. Much has been said on this already, and I will not repeat the points made by previous speakers. However, patient needs will be better met if we move to a tariff structure that better reflects clinical complexity. The Government’s response to the Future Forum report seems to recognise this, but the current tariff structure overcompensates for simpler conditions and consistently under-compensates for more complex and unpredictable areas of care. To encourage integrated working, consideration needs to be given to a system in which payments are received over a longer term and for the achievement of integration and good clinical outcomes. To do that, it will be crucial for Monitor and the Commissioning Board working closely with royal medical colleges and specialist societies to develop a tariff that will provide integrated care.

[Baroness Murphy]

My Lords, much has been said on this group of amendments and I will not delay the Committee too much. I have a great deal of sympathy with the plea of the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, that we should know what integrated care is. We have had several descriptions around the House. We have within the Bill a duty to promote integrated care, so it is important that we have read into the account the Government’s thinking on what “integrated care” means. I think that I echo the noble Lord, Lord Ribeiro, in saying that.

I am surprised that my noble friend Lord Walton, who is not in his place at the moment, did not mention Mrs Smith of 66 Acacia Avenue, or we might have said Mr Chowdry of 66 Mafeking Avenue. What does sitting at home feel like to those patients who are in receipt of community care? How does it work out for them? Integration of primary and secondary care with social care provision is what it really should be about. I look to the Government to reassure me that that is what we are talking about.

We have to be aware that some barriers in the NHS will require this financial manipulation. On the one hand, there is a profound mistrust by acute providers of the competence of community-based and primary care workers. Sometimes that has been justifiable in the light of the historical deskilling of clinical care that occurs in primary care settings. On the other hand, there is an attitude bordering on paranoia from community and primary services staff about the predatory nature of what Enoch Powell referred to as the “voracious” acute hospital sector, which is entirely justified by their experience of being sucked in to the acute hospital, and especially true since payment by results came in, which has had a really negative effect on this problem. Then there is the wild card of GPs who can suddenly bring to a halt community-based care out of hours, if they feel like it, without any impact on their budget at all. Noble Lords who, like me, have spent a great deal of time putting in packages of care will understand how frustrating it can be when it suddenly comes to a halt and nobody has budgetary responsibility for it.