Edenfield Centre: Treatment of Patients

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

Thursday 13th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Markham (Con)]

My Lords, I completely agree with the question in making sure that this does not happen or is not happening elsewhere. We have been in touch with the CQC, as one would expect, which has made significant changes to protect people in specialist services, people with learning difficulties and autistic people in mental health patient settings. These include making it mandatory for all staff to undertake specialist training before inspecting these settings and introducing a new single assessment framework, which would allow more frequent inspections of the worst-performing providers. The CQC is doing a number of things around that framework, including six key evidence categories, which set out the type of evidence that will be collected. These categories are: people’s experiences; feedback from staff and leaders; observation of care; feedback from partners; processes; and outcome of care. The new assessment means that more targeted time can be spent on site, taking longer to talk to people using services and making every minute count.

Those are some of the standing replies. On a personal level, there clearly need to be questions about how the CQC can go in on an ad hoc basis because, when an investigation or inspection has been announced, a place has an opportunity to put things right. One area of my interest—and I do not claim to be an expert on this—is how we can pick up those ad hoc cases quickly. Clearly, we should not be expecting people such as “Panorama” to be doing that; we want to pick those up ourselves.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, despite the Minister just commenting on the way it is possible for some organisations to game-play inspections, it is noticeable that the CQC inspection of 2019, published in 2020, was “Good”, despite the finding that,

“In acute wards … records did not show that supervision of staff in the service was effective”,


which was a “breach of regulation”. This is really concerning.

Reform of the Mental Health Act is long overdue. It was created over 40 years ago, and many noble Lords have been fighting for that to happen. It was good to hear in the Queen’s Speech that there will be a draft mental health Bill, but there are real concerns that it is about to be shelved. My honourable friend Munira Wilson MP asked the Minister responding to this Urgent Question whether it was going to come forward. She did not get a straight answer. I ask the Minister whether Parliament, and this House in particular, will see the mental health Bill this Session.

[Lord Markham (Con)]

My Lords, like the noble Baroness, I am aware that the White Paper is in draft, but I have not seen its latest status. I know it will address some of the issues that we all agree are not to our satisfaction. At the moment, I can undertake only to understand the position of the White Paper and come back to her, if I may.