Mental Capacity (Amendment) Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Hunt of Kings Heath and Baroness Finlay of Llandaff

Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords
Wednesday 21st November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff]

My Lords, there is a tone of disappointment because I welcome all the government amendments, but the role of my amendment to government Amendment 52 was twofold. First, I am disappointed that speech and language therapists were not in that list read out by the Minister, because we had a debate about the importance of communication skills. When communication is impaired, particularly with disorders that affect any part of the speech or throat cycle, it is very difficult to assess someone’s capacity.

I included skills because I worry that experience and knowledge are sometimes just not enough. If the Government insist on “skills” going into the code of practice, I hope that the Minister will be able to confirm that the skills will be assessed and reviewed at appraisal, and that they demonstrate an understanding of the impact of fear—being frightened—on the way the person behaves.

The assessors must have a high level of communication skills and awareness of all the different ways that communication can be enhanced. I hope that they would also have an awareness of the impact of different types of medication on someone’s capacity, because sometimes changing the medication can really improve a person’s ability to make a decision for themselves.

Amendment 53 links to Amendment 74, which is in my name and will come up later. I am concerned that, without strong reassurance, some of these issues could slip by and we could inadvertently end up having superficial assessments of some people and not the thorough and in-depth ones they deserve. The whole principle of the Mental Capacity Act is to empower people to make their own decisions, and we are talking about trying to have the least restrictive option so that we can enhance a person’s liberty as much as possible. If that assessment is not meticulous with the appropriate skills, the wrong judgments could end up being made.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

My Lords, I realise that in the last group I mentioned general medical practitioners. I ought to inform the House of my forthcoming appointment to the General Medical Council.

We have had a lot to read in the last few days, and are clearly going to have to take a lot of this on trust, but the thrust of the amendments is welcome, and I am grateful to the Minister for tabling them. As he said, they strengthen the role of local authorities and give them a clear remit to intervene where they feel that, for one reason or another, the care home manager cannot discharge the responsibilities given in relation to the authorisation application appropriately.

In the letter that the Minister sent to a number of noble Lords, he set out factors that might be considered by the local authority as a responsible body. These would be:

“Whether the person has a care plan with the responsible body … local intelligence about a local provider of care homes”,


which would suggest that the responsible body takes over the process;

“insight from local commissioners or concerns about performance … sustained absence of a registered manager”—

or presumably when the turnover of managers is high, as it can be; and—

“an increase in concerns raised by residents, their carers or families … a new service or category of care provision, and/or … provision of poor or incomplete statements”.

To me that sounds very comprehensive and welcome.

What arises from this is that the responsible body will have to make a considerable judgment and, to make it, will need a very clear understanding of the care homes in its area. Could the Minister say a little about how he thinks that local authorities might be supported in that role? Clearly, they now have a major role which they have found it hard to discharge, for reasons that have been discussed. It is important they are able to do this in a consistent way.

The Minister mentioned the code of practice. It is a statutory code of practice, which I think means that it must be followed unless the local body has very good reason not to do so. It would be interesting to know what plans the department has for checking with the local authorities—not in a heavy-handed way—how well it is going after time and implementation, and seeing whether there is consistency across the country as a whole.

Mental Capacity (Amendment) Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Hunt of Kings Heath and Baroness Finlay of Llandaff

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

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)]

My Lords, any restriction to a person’s liberty is a serious step that calls for a corresponding level of scrutiny. To do otherwise would devalue the currency of liberty. We must remember how this legislation will work in practice and that it is authorising one citizen to detain another, usually more vulnerable, citizen. This decision carries risks, not least the risk of undermining an individual’s self-esteem and dignity. Therefore it is imperative to ensure that only appropriate and experienced individuals are given the authority to assess capacity and plan the care programme for the cared- for person, with their best interests at the heart of decision-making.

I will speak to the amendments in this group that are in my name—Amendments 14A, 16A, 19C, 19E, 19F, 30C and 32C—which seek to probe an alternative to involving the care manager directly in the process and to align it more closely with the Care Act. Much anxiety has been expressed since Second Reading about the role of the care home manager because there has been concern that the manager is not an appropriate person to carry out or even co-ordinate assessments. There have also been concerns that the cost of providing adequate training would be high and that the proposed training of a few hours would prove grossly inadequate.

The Minister gave assurances on the first day in Committee when he explained that,

“the care home manager would be responsible for arranging the assessments for the responsible body—not necessarily carrying out but arranging”.—[Official Report, 5/9/19; col. 1882.]

He pointed out that care homes already play a role in arranging assessments because they are responsible for identifying deprivation of liberty and then notifying the relevant local authority which under current arrangements, will then send out a best-interests assessor to visit and assess. He pointed out that the assessments that the care home manager will have a duty to arrange will be carried out at the care assessment stage as part of early planning, often by social workers.

However, in discussion with stakeholders, concern has highlighted self-funders, who could risk getting a low level of protection in law and find that the cost of assessment is rolled into their care home costs. Whatever is decided, a care home manager will remain responsible for identifying those whose liberty is restricted and therefore will be responsible for triggering assessments. Nothing in the Bill permits searches to case-find anyone who has not been flagged up and therefore is illegally detained.

Unfortunately, the concerns expressed by stakeholders have not diminished, despite the many meetings at which reassurances have been offered. Those concerns include that the care home manager, even if not undertaking assessments directly, would have a power of veto and that the authorisation of assessments would become a paper exercise. There is also concern that the costs associated with making the assessment would be transferred from the local authority to the care home, but that the funding would not move from the local authority to the care home, leaving the person being assessed, if they are a self-funder, to carry the burden of additional costs.

Regarding conflicts of interest, although some care managers are excellent, not all have the appropriate background experience, and the local authority would remain liable in law for authorising the deprivation based on information from the care home manager. But we must not lose sight of why the Bill is here. The number of people waiting for assessments seems to be rising exponentially and is currently around 125,000 in England and Wales. Even if money was thrown at assessments now, there are not enough people and the current process is too complicated to ensure that they happen.

It is relatively easy to talk about a process, but we must focus on the individual. To the individual, it is not the assessment per se that protects their liberty but the way that they are cared for on a day-to-day basis. They can have the most thorough assessment in the world, but if it is a once-a-year process, they may spend the rest of the year with restrictions on liberty that go unnoticed. That is why a new process to protect liberty must link directly to the care plan that contains details of how the person’s freedoms will be enhanced and how they will be empowered within the ethos of the Mental Capacity Act to live as well as possible. Some may argue that you can have a well-written care plan that is not carried out, but later amendments would enable people to raise concerns and request a reassessment.

It is important to recognise that necessary and proportionate arrangements may restrict liberty in some areas in order to empower the person to live as fully as possible despite the restrictions that their disorder has imposed on them. In some care homes a great deal is done to enhance living through outings, personalised crafts and musical arrangements, or when residents are encouraged to pursue their interests while keeping them safe from obvious dangers. Sadly, in other care homes residents are left sitting in a circle around a blaring television. Their experience means either that they have a low quality of life or in effect feel imprisoned.

It is the day-to-day living experience that matters. The way the care is delivered to allow that experience should be enshrined in a good care plan that encompasses encouraging social interaction and contact with the family, and accepts a reasonable degree of risk while avoiding clearly identifiable major risks. It should specify what the protection of liberty arrangements are that need to be approved by the responsible body. Words matter. Perhaps we should drop the words “liberty protection safeguards” because they can be confused with safeguarding procedures and instead use the term “liberty protection arrangements”, which would probably be abbreviated to PoLAs to replace DoLS.

I know that Amendment 14A looks strange because it comes half way through a paragraph. Ideally the amendment would delete the whole of paragraph 13 in Part 2 of Schedule 1, but given that we reached the end of line 35 on day one of Committee, I believe that the amendment can start only at line 36. However, I hope that the other amendments I have tabled in this group make better sense if we understand that the whole of paragraph 13 should have been deleted.

We know that we cannot throw money at a failing system and that not everyone needs the full might of the current assessment process of DoLS. If care homes are not described differently, it may open the way for others to be required to do the assessments in all settings by the responsible body’s direction, which would mirror Section 42(2) of the Care Act, which states:

“The local authority must make (or cause to be made) whatever enquiries it thinks necessary to enable it to decide whether any action should be taken in the adult’s case (whether under this Part or otherwise) and, if so, what and by whom”.


That subsection was designed to safeguard by triggering an inquiry if there is a suspicion of unmet care needs, abuse or neglect. In the amendments I have tabled, I have tried to make the responsible body reflect the same arrangements so that it would either provide assessments or cause them to be provided. Many supported living settings are competent to do such assessments and many care homes could do them in routine cases by being asked for information by the responsible body without any power of veto resting with the care home manager.

I am grateful to Lorraine Currie, the professional Mental Capacity Act lead in Shropshire, for discussing this with me in detail. I hope that by more closely aligning liberty protection with the Care Act we might have a more streamlined process. I beg to move.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, Amendments 17A, 19A, 30B, 30D, 32B an 32E are in my name. The noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, expressed very well some of the key challenges we face in scrutinising the Bill. My amendments would remove the role of the care manager in overseeing the determination that the arrangements are necessary and proportionate. They would also remove the care home manager from carrying out consultation to try to ascertain the cared-for person’s wishes or feelings on the arrangements. In both cases, the result of my amendments would be that responsibility falling to the responsible local authority.

The noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, spoke about the issues facing the sector in trying to implement the current legislation. The problem seems to be that the Government, in their haste to respond to this and the undoubted challenge of the Cheshire West judgment, have come up with a streamlined procedure in which the human rights of the cared-for person are sacrificed on the altar of bureaucratic convenience. The careful balance that the Law Commission put into the draft Bill has been overturned, safeguards have been removed and protections have been overridden. The analyses we have received have been very valuable, but the Law Society’s analysis is a succinct, devastating critique of the Government’s approach.

The proposal means that the very people with a vested interest in keeping cared-for people occupying beds in care homes have been placed in the driving seat in the process of overseeing the restriction of their liberty. According to the Bill, those cared-for persons have lost the right to participate in decisions affecting them, have no right to be consulted, have no right, like their relatives, to be told how to challenge a deprivation of liberty and have no right to request a review. On that latter point, they must rely on the interested person who, when you look at the Bill, remarkably turns out to be the care home manager; nor is there any obligation for the responsible body to meet the cared-for person before signing off on their deprivation of liberty. That is the background to why the amendments are so important and why the Bill’s basis is so flawed.

I cannot find an explicit duty to consult the cared-for person about their wishes and feelings. That is worrying in itself; it is a major defect in relation to the existing legislation. I also find worrying the extraordinary proposition that the care home manager should carry out the consultation. Essentially, they are judge and jury for the person’s liberty, since the consultation is about the outcome of the required assessment that the care home manager is responsible for arranging. As far as I can see, the care home manager will choose who will make that assessment and, presumably, pay their fees. They are also the gatekeeper for the appointment of an independent mental capacity advocate, which cannot happen without the care home manager saying that it is in the cared-for person’s best interests. However, we can see that the care home manager has a vested financial interest in these matters, as does the care home. On consultation, the Bill must be seriously rethought. That also applies to paragraph 16 of Schedule 1 on the determination that arrangements are necessary and proportionate. Currently under the Bill, it falls to the care home manager to decide who should make the determination. This, of course, is a vital test and the determination of the arrangements relates directly to the practice under Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

My Lords, my Amendment 37A would preclude the care home manager undertaking the pre-authorisation review, which follows on from what the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, was saying. However, the Minister floated his answer to this point very recently. I thought I caught him saying that the pre-authorisation review can be done only under the auspices of the responsible body. Perhaps he can confirm that when he comes to speak because it is not clear in the Bill, as I see it. On page 10, paragraph 12 of Schedule 1 states:

“The responsible body may authorise arrangements, other than care home arrangements, if … a pre-authorisation review has been carried out in accordance with paragraphs 18 to 20”.


That relates to those cases where the care home manager does not have a role. Paragraph 13 of Schedule 1 simply states:

“The responsible body may authorise care home arrangements”,


if a number of qualifications have been met, including if,

“a pre-authorisation review has been carried out in accordance with paragraphs 18 to 20”.

I cannot see anything in the Bill that says that the pre-authorisation review cannot be carried out by the care home manager. If that is the case, it would be nice to see its inclusion in the Bill, which would provide some reassurance.

I know that we always stray here because we keep coming back to the issue of a conflict of interest. Has the Minister read the Law Society’s view, which we received over the weekend? The society described the fact that the care home manager has been put into a position of co-ordinating the way in which the Bill needs to be operated when a care home setting is involved as a “conflict of interest”. It stated:

“Vulnerable adults would be put at risk if care homes were given increased responsibility for decisions about their liberty”.


It also said that important safeguards “would be weakened”, stating that the,

“shift of responsibility for carrying out independent assessments of vulnerable people from local authorities to care providers”,

is not something that the Law Commission developed. However, we are working on the basis of a Law Commission draft Bill.

Although the noble Lord is as committed as ever to the care home manager having this key role, I am not at all convinced that this really is feasible. It will not be good enough for the Government to provide reassurance, which I doubt they can, about the training of care home managers and their capacity to carry out this responsibility, particularly in view of the big backlog that will have to be confronted, I suppose, by the care homes. I do not see any provision in the Bill for the current backlog to be dealt with under the existing legal requirements. There is a great deal of scepticism about whether this is going to work.

[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.

Mental Capacity (Amendment) Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Hunt of Kings Heath and Baroness Finlay of Llandaff

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 5th September 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff]

My Lords, I support the principle behind Amendment 8 in particular. Perhaps this is something the Minister will want to view as going in the code of practice, as I am not sure that putting this on the face of the Bill is necessarily the right place for it—although I completely understand the sentiment, which is to avoid serious risk. We live in a risk-averse system, and it is serious risk that we must be concerned with.

A case that I heard about in the last few days came to mind. An elderly lady with dementia became extremely agitated when it snowed. Because of her tendency to wander, she was not going outside unescorted. A conversation with her son revealed that she had been a meteorologist, so her view was that when it snowed she had to go outside and measure the depth of the snow and telephone the Meteorological Office. What they did was simply wrap her up really well, let her go out and measure the depth of the snow, give her a telephone and let her make a mock phone call to the Meteorological Office. She was very calm and happy. You do not want her to go wandering because she is near a main road and a railway line and all the other risks, but it was not a serious risk to let her out in the garden, well-wrapped up when it was snowing. That illustrates the granularity of the need to take appropriate decisions focused around the individual person.

Other cases that do concern me are those people who will become sexually disinhibited when exposed to great temptation. That struck me about a case I came across in a home for people with a history of sexual offences. There had been a DoLS in place for somebody not to go unescorted through woodland because, if he came across a young girl on her own in woodland, his sexual drive would overcome his rational behaviour—exposure to porn sites would also overcome his rational behaviour. However, the rest of the time, he could live well. Sadly, that DoLS was apparently overturned by the Court of Protection and, within weeks, he offended and ended up being imprisoned for his offence, but he had been living well with an enormous degree of freedom prior to that point. I think that the serious risk to the cared-for person has to be considered, because there the risk to him was that he would offend and, sadly, that came true.

I hope that the Minister will look sympathetically on the sentiment behind this.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

My Lords, my Amendments 27 and 28 follow the same lines of argument that we have heard from the noble Baronesses but relate to paragraph 16, “Determination that arrangements are necessary and proportionate”, on page 12 of the Bill.

I know the Minister will refer us back to Section 4 of the Mental Capacity Act, which is very comprehensive in defining what “best interests” are. Clearly, the intention is that, because it is stated there as a principle at the front of the Act, that permeates through all of the issues that we will be discussing in this amendment Bill. There is always an issue when you have an amendment Bill. It is not incorporated in the principal Act and is quite difficult to follow. It will be difficult to follow for the practitioners who are going to have to operate the new provisions. This must relate, too, to the code of practice. We seek certain reassurances that it will be made clear to the people at the front line who are going to operate it that the best interests provisions in this amendment Bill will apply equally.

What is confusing is the wording “necessary and proportionate”. In a sense, the Government are saying there is a qualification—that things have to be necessary and proportionate. I wonder whether that is helpful. It is confusing that we have a qualification of necessary and proportionate, but in the principal Act it is “best interests”. Clearly, these are probing amendments, seeking to tease this issue out, but I wonder whether the Government could give further consideration to how we can ensure that everyone involved is very clear that the best interests apply.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Lord Hunt of Kings Heath and Baroness Finlay of Llandaff

Committee: 8th sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Monday 19th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)]

My Lords, I support the amendment. I remind the House that many of these inventions in the biomedical sphere actually happen in academic clinical departments. That is where the idea comes—the bright spark of invention. They will establish whatever the device is, and then often it will be a spin-out company from the university that will start to develop it. These new devices are getting smaller and smaller so they are getting into smaller blood vessels or parts of the body to do things that, when I graduated in medicine, were unimaginable.

However, in order for a company to be able to go out and market the device, it has to be able to go through all the rigorous testing procedures that the noble Lord, Lord Warner, outlined. So if we create yet another barrier and another difficulty, the bright sparks are not going to stay here because other universities are already looking at them. Those universities want them and their inventiveness; in Europe they are very attractive commodities. We have to remember that a part of our economy and our economic strategy has depended on our science, and our biological sciences in particular. We have a unique situation with the NHS where we have a broad patient population that is different from some of the other ways in which healthcare is organised and allows such innovation to happen here.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, this has been an excellent debate. Here we have a successful and innovative industry with lots of SMEs involved, but their very future is at risk because of the approach that the Government are taking to Brexit. We need to be clear about this. The noble Lord, Lord Empey, talked about CE marking and the notified body. What is crucial is that the CE marking is a logo placed on medical devices to show that they conform to the requirements of the various EU directives. The notified body is an organisation that has been designated by an EU member state to assess whether manufacturers and their medical devices meet the requirements set out in legislation. As part of our being within the EU, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency is the designated competent authority in the UK. That sets out the legal position and why it is so important in terms of both patient safety and the ability of UK companies to do business in the rest of the EU and market some of the most extraordinary machines, devices and developments that have been seen in the world.

Here we come to the point where there is such a risky position for our companies. To take the point of the noble Lord, Lord Deben, we should look at Mrs May’s Mansion House speech, where she referred to the fact that the Government,

“want to explore with the EU, the terms on which the UK could remain part of EU agencies such as those that are critical for the chemicals, medicines and aerospace industries”—

and she mentioned the European Medicines Agency by name, although, extraordinarily, not Euratom, which we will come to debate later this evening and tomorrow. She went on to explain why we should be seeking associate membership of the European Medicines Agency and the other agencies named. She said:

“First, associate membership of these agencies is the only way to meet our objective of ensuring that these products only need to undergo one series of approvals, in one country. Second, these agencies have a critical role in setting and enforcing relevant rules … Third, associate membership could permit UK firms to resolve certain challenges related to the agencies through UK courts … Fourth it would bring other benefits too. For example, membership of the European Medicines Agency would mean investment in new innovative medicines continuing in the UK, and it would mean these medicines getting to patients faster as firms prioritise larger markets when they start the lengthy process of seeking authorisations”.


If ever I have heard a convincing case for remaining a member of the EU, the Prime Minister set it out in her Mansion House speech. The point is the one that the noble Lord, Lord Deben, made. We are going to beg for associate membership. As the Prime Minister said, we will follow the rules and pay the cost, but we will have no say in the rules that are being set. At the moment, the MHRA is one of the most effective negotiators in the EU, so when it comes to medicines safety or devices, the UK has a huge influence. That means a big advantage for UK companies, because it has in mind the interests of the UK as a whole.

We are to throw all this away and be supplicants at the altar of those agencies, because the Government have woken up to the fact that they cannot let those industries go down, so they will have to negotiate associate membership. It will be on EU terms, because they are a lot bigger than we are. We will have to abide by their rules but no longer will we have any say in how those rules are developed. As the noble Lord, Lord Deben, said, we are trying to negotiate the least worst option, but it is a worst option.

It is a wholly depressing picture: this Government seeking to destroy so many of our innovative industries through their obdurate and ignorant approach to the way industry, the UK and the EU work. The noble Lord, Lord Empey, has done us a great service tonight by letting us debate this important issue. It would be nice, would it not, to hear a proper response from the Government to show that they recognise the problems that they are now causing for British industry?