Coronavirus Act 2020 (Expiry of Mental Health Provisions) (England and Wales) Regulations 2020

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Wednesday 25th November 2020 Grand Committee

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, I unequivocally endorse the Minister’s words of appreciation of the work of everyone, at every level, who has maintained a degree of service that has avoided the use of the powers under Schedule 8. It is an unalloyed pleasure not to be giving the Minister a hard time, given that, as far as I can see and looking back in history, no other Minister in the Lords has taken more flak for the Government as a whole for so little reward. It is therefore a pleasure to be able to say that this is a very welcome move.

Noble Lords will remember, because they were either in the Chamber or, more likely, watching, the powerful speech made by the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, back on 25 March, when the Minister was putting the Bill through this House. On both disability and mental health, she understandably warned of the danger to the rights of so many people from the measures that were felt at the time to be needed to ensure that functioning services could continue, albeit without the safeguards that all of us would wish. This afternoon we acknowledge that those safeguards are being put back in place—their erosion has not been needed—and, as the Minister said, that is due to so much hard work and ingenuity by so many people. I am sorry that the Welsh Administration feel that they still need the measures as a backstop. I hope that they will not, after their two-week lockdown, feel that they still need to be used.

I just ask the Minister in a friendly way whether he can identify—if not this afternoon, perhaps he can write to me—any service level agreement from the Treasury in relation to the £3 billion announced by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in respect of mental health services? While the withdrawal of the powers under Schedule 8 is entirely welcome, the capacity within the system before the Covid pandemic was under enormous strain, and that has obviously been made worse by the number of people who have experienced mental health and stress issues over the past nine months. Many more will experience these over the winter until we have the vaccine onstream and can get back to some sort of normality.

Capacity will remain a major question for all of us, and I hope that the Minister will be able to confirm that a proportion of the additional resource being allocated to getting the health service back onstream and undertaking the diagnostic and treatment requirements that have so often been delayed will also apply to the capacity of the mental health services. With that, I welcome the regulations very strongly.