Mental Health Units (Use of Force) Bill

Norman Lamb Excerpts

Report stage: House of Commons
Friday 15th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Reed]

The hon. Gentleman raises an important point, and I look forward to the comments of the Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, the hon. Member for Thurrock (Jackie Doyle-Price). It is important that there is consistency across all forms of state detention so that those who suffer traumatic circumstances, or even death, are treated in the same way.

If lessons are not learned from such incidents, the chance to prevent further deaths is missed, and we end up with a series of what look like isolated tragic incidents, such as Seni’s death, that are actually part of a wider institutional problem that has not been recognised and therefore not dealt with. It is unacceptable that institutions responsible for the care of patients suffering from mental ill health are subject to less scrutiny than institutions that detain criminal suspects and prisoners. It is no wonder that the casework of the campaigning charity Inquest, which works with bereaved families, shows that so many people who rely on such services no longer have confidence in them.

Another barrier to justice for families is funding for legal representation. Dame Elish Angiolini’s excellent report concluded last year that

“families face an intrusive and complex mechanism for securing funding”,

because there

“is no legal aid for inquests other than in exceptional circumstances”.

The Angiolini report recommended that legal aid should be awarded to families in the case of deaths in police custody. The Government have accepted that there is a need to look at that in the Lord Chancellor’s review and, in the spirit of consensus that has characterised the development of the Bill, I would welcome an update from the Minister on what work is being done on that. It makes little sense not to extend legal aid to situations in a mental health unit, because we need consistency across all forms of state custody. The families of patients should certainly not be disadvantaged compared with other bereaved families, and new clause 2 would ensure that legal aid is available to family members in relation to an investigation of an unnatural death in a mental health unit.

I will briefly address some of the amendments tabled by the Government, the hon. Members for Shipley and for Christchurch (Sir Christopher Chope), and the right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb). I welcome their efforts to strengthen the Bill, which has progressed through the Commons with a real sense of consensus, both from the Minister, and from every professional body and patient advocacy active in the sector. It is important that such work continues during the Bill’s remaining stages and beyond.

On the scope of the Bill and which mental health units it applies to, the hon. Member for Christchurch tabled amendments 86, 87 and 92 to 95, which would extend the Bill’s scope to cover all independent providers of mental health care. The principle behind the amendments seems sound, because every patient, whether NHS or private, should be protected by the same rights. However, I know that the Minister has some concerns about the practicalities of extending the Bill’s scope in that way, not least about how wholly private providers would report data through NHS Digital and the limits of statutory guidance in that respect, so I look forward to her comments.

[Norman Lamb (North Norfolk) (LD)]

Does the hon. Gentleman share my view that whether the measure gets into the Bill or not, we need to reach a point at which data is provided from private providers and from the NHS in exactly the same way so that we can compare how people are treated on both sides of the divide?

[Mr Reed]

I absolutely agree. The Bill sets up a process and attempts to change the culture of the services, and I hope that the Bill’s successful passage will not be the end of that process. The right hon. Gentleman’s point needs to be taken into account.

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[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, but he is being slightly naive in thinking that we will get some rapid decision making. As, I think, Mr Speaker, you were alluding to in your response to my point of order, the only time that the Government appear to be able to act with speed is when they think they are going to lose a vote. At that point, they seem to be able to react with miraculous speed. We do not seem to need any write-arounds at that point, or eight days of write-arounds; they appear to be able to cobble something together within seconds, particularly if my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve) clicks his fingers. They then appear to swoop into action in no time whatsoever. It seems to me that if hon. Members actually want to improve the Bill, they should be busily telling their Whip that if we put these amendments to a vote, they will vote for them—I hope, Mr Speaker, that you will allow some of them to be put to a vote, particularly where the hon. Member for Croydon North says that he actually agrees with them. Perhaps then we might have some rapid decision making after all. We will see, but it has been yet another depressing morning in the history of Parliament for me. I have been here 13 years, but have found out only today how these things work. I started off cynical and I have become even more cynical as time has gone on.

I shall go through the farce of speaking to my amendments, even though we cannot actually make any headway on them. As the hon. Member for Croydon North alluded to, amendments 44 to 78 apply throughout the Bill and change the wording from “use of force” to “use of restraint”. I was encouraged to hear him say that he had originally believed that the term should be the “use of restraint”, but had been persuaded to change it to “use of force” by, I think, the Government.

The comments I make here largely come after consultation with my local Bradford District Care NHS Foundation Trust. The amendments that I have tabled would ensure that the terminology used in the Bill was correct and in line with that commonly used by mental health trusts. The term “use of force” is predominantly used by police forces in reference to the use of physical force while carrying out their duties. It is important to note that, although the police do play a part in the restraining of patients, it appears that the Bill’s primary focus is on the restraint methods used by staff in a mental health unit. Although we must not forget that the police are on occasion called to assist in the physical restraint of patients, it would be more appropriate to adopt the correct mental health terminology for actions used predominantly by mental health staff in a mental health setting. Not only that, but the use of the word “force” in this regard is somewhat misleading and suggests that the restraint being used on patients is being conducted with a degree of aggression, violence or excessive force, which is simply not the case.

I am told that restraining a patient, particularly in a mental health unit, often involves little to no use of actual force in the sense that most of us would understand it. The term “restraint” has been adopted as common terminology within mental health trusts and covers varying degrees of interaction with a patient. It can be applied, for example, to a person simply holding out a hand to stop someone advancing towards them, or to methods of calming such as simply talking to a patient. They are examples of the use of restraint.

[Norman Lamb]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way. In my experience both from my time as a Minister and from talking to many people in mental health, restraint covers an enormous range of circumstances, from the very light-touch to very considerable force, including pinning people to the floor with face-down restraint, which was the action that led to the tragic death of Olaseni Lewis. It is not right to say that it cannot involve considerable force; it often does.

[Philip Davies]

The right hon. Gentleman certainly knows more about this subject than I do, and probably more than anybody in this House, and I commend him for that. Absolutely—I am certainly not saying that the use of restraint never involves the use of excessive force; it absolutely does. My point is that it often does not. To throw all these things in together by using the word “force” is not only not within the terminology generally used in mental health trusts, but slightly misleading given what the norm in this area is.

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[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. I do not know the answer to that—who knows? It is a mystery to me, and therefore it will almost certainly be a mystery to any institutions trying to implement these measures. We have to bear in mind that this is not just meaningless. This will be the law of the land. Institutions and members of staff could well be taken to court over whether they have sufficiently taken into account these “principal” ethical issues. Surely it would be intolerable to put people in that legal uncertainty. I am not entirely sure that we, the people who are passing this piece of legislation, have any idea what it means ourselves, so how on earth are the people who are supposed to implement this meant to?

Surely laws have to be fit for purpose. I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch is an eminent lawyer by background, and no doubt his profession will be dancing in the aisles at the prospect of all this uncertainty, because they are the only people who will benefit. The patients will not benefit, the staff certainly will not benefit, and the institutions will not benefit, because they will probably find themselves facing expensive legal suits. Unless this is simply a benefit for the legal profession, I cannot see any point to it whatsoever.

I am confident of scoring a few more runs on amendment 11, because the hon. Member for Croydon North indicated that he supported it. As I indicated to Mr Speaker at the start, I may wish to press the amendment to a Division and test the will of the House on this matter. The amendment would insert new paragraph (l) in clause 5(2), which relates to training in the appropriate use of force, to include training for mental health staff about who is responsible, and the roles and procedure when the police are called to assist.

Some people may say—I would not necessarily dismiss this out of hand—that clause 5 is already too prescriptive. There is an argument for saying that we should take out this detailed list of things that people should be trained in and effectively leave it to institutions and local experts to sort out training for themselves, rather than putting every little element of what that training should consist of in statute. There is certainly an argument for saying that we should get rid of all these areas of training that are prescribed. Of course, the problem with prescribing everything is that what will happen is that everything prescribed will be covered, but nothing else will be. Something may well have been missed out from the list, but if it is not on the list, institutions will not bother with it. That is my problem. Given that we are prescribing so much, it is essential that we get those things right, otherwise important things will be missed in the training. It seems to me that we go one of two ways: either we do not prescribe any of it; or we prescribe everything, because otherwise things will be missed out.

[Norman Lamb]

I suspect that the hon. Gentleman and I agree that it is really important to protect the individual against the overbearing power of the state, and the Bill is primarily about achieving that—protecting individuals who are often in very vulnerable positions against the potential misuse of power. Giving some detail about what the training must cover, so as to ensure that people are treated with respect and dignity, and their rights are protected, is surely something that he agrees is rather important.

[Philip Davies]

Absolutely I do—I am not sure that anyone would disagree with that. The issue is how we best ensure that the training is comprehensive and covers the necessary areas. My point is that there are two ways of doing that in law. One option is to simply say that training should be given and effectively leave it to the experts in the field to determine what that should cover. The Bill has gone a different way—I am not saying that it is necessarily wrong; we can argue it both ways—by literally prescribing in law what should be covered in that training.

Given that we are going down that route, it is essential that we include the things that are missing from that list, because if we do not include them, institutions will look at what it is their legal responsibility to cover, and then cover all those things, and that will be it. They will not cover anything else, because they will presume, not unreasonably, that what has been produced for them is an exhaustive list of what should be covered. My amendments 11 and 12 merely highlight that essential things to cover have been missed off the list.

When the hon. Member for Croydon North opened the batting, he kindly agreed that the things specified in amendments 11 and 12 are important and should be included in the training, and that he therefore supported them. His issue with including them in the Bill arose from the suggestion that they could be simply covered in guidance. The Minister might have something to say about that, but I do not understand this. It appears that the Government do not have the authority to agree to put these things in the Bill, but miraculously do have the authority to agree that they should go into guidance. If they have the authority to agree that these things should go into guidance, why on earth do they not have the authority to agree that they should go in the Bill? It makes no sense to me, but that is the beauty of the establishment.

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[Philip Davies]

I am very grateful for that intervention, and I also very much welcome them and salute them for everything they have done in Mr Lewis’s honour. I would just say two things to them. First, they have a fantastic Member of Parliament who has done a great job representing their interests in the House—they should be very proud of their Member of Parliament. Secondly, we are all agreed that it is essential that this House passes laws—through this Bill, we hope—that will ensure that what happened to Mr Lewis will never happen to anybody else ever again. That unites everybody in this debate, whatever our individual views on any particular amendment.

[Norman Lamb]

I am conscious of the fact that the hon. Gentleman has been speaking for two hours. He is raising legitimate points, but I feel passionately that the Bill has to be passed into law, and I know that many other hon. Members share that view. I have a real concern—I do not think this is his intention; I hope it is not—that we could end up with the Bill being talked out today, which would risk it being lost. It would be a tragedy if that happened, and I urge him to allow other Members to contribute to this debate so that we can reach a conclusion.

[Philip Davies]

I hear what the right hon. Gentleman says, but clearly he has not heard what I have said. The Bill would not be lost, as he well knows. He has been here long enough to know exactly how procedure works in the House. As the Bill has already started its Report stage, it would very easily slot to the top of the queue on a future date, when it could go through. I hope that it would go through in a better state, once the Government have had time to look at the amendments that they need to consider in order to make the changes to the Bill that the hon. Member for Croydon North has agreed should be made. All I am trying to do is to deliver what the hon. Gentleman wants in the Bill.

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[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch will have noticed that at no point did anybody in the Chair say that I was off-subject, and there were over 100 amendments to consider.

I would like the Government to take responsibility for my amendments 11 and 12, which the hon. Member for Croydon North, the promoter, wants to include in the Bill. I hope that we get the opportunity to test the will of the House on those amendments, especially if he supports them, and we will see what Members make of them. If we do not include amendments 11 and 12 in the Bill, we are doing a really big disservice to the people we are trying to help and we are doing a disservice to the honour of Mr Lewis, which is what the hon. Gentleman’s Bill is all about. Those two amendments go to the heart of what he is trying to achieve with his Bill, and I hope that Members will reflect on that before we vote on them.

[Norman Lamb]

In speaking today, including about the amendments I have tabled, I take a different view from that of the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies), in that I want the Bill to proceed. It is not perfect—there are things that I think should be included, which is why I have tabled amendments—but it is more important to get on the statute book this very important staging post in changing the culture in many mental health trusts than to delay it further.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Croydon North (Mr Reed), who has done a brilliant job in advocating the case for this reform, as he has in his advocacy on behalf of Mr and Mrs Lewis. It is an enormous pleasure to support him today in that endeavour. I particularly note the role that Mr and Mrs Lewis, who are present in the Gallery today, have played in all of this. They have fought their campaign with enormous dignity and with absolute determination to secure justice for the loss of their dear son. They have had a willing Member of Parliament working with them, but if the Bill reaches the statute book, it will be to their enormous credit for the battle they have fought, and we should all applaud them for the contribution they have made in achieving that.

I met Mr and Mrs Lewis when I was the Minister responsible for mental health. I remember a debate in this place in which the hon. Gentleman raised their case. I was horrified by what I heard while sitting on the Front Bench, and I agreed to meet them. I met Mr and Mrs Lewis in my parliamentary office, and I took up their concerns with the Independent Police Complaints Commission, because the case did not appear to me to have been properly investigated. They have continued to fight stoically for justice, and I pay enormous tribute to them for doing so.

My interest in this issue as a Minister arose back in 2013, when Mind did a survey showing that the use of force—I use that term advisedly—was endemic across in-patient mental health settings around the country. Not only that, but the use of force varied incredibly from one unit to another, without any apparent justification. As a result of the Mind survey, I decided that we had to review the guidance. In due course, that led to the non-statutory guidance on “Positive and Proactive Care”, which was issued in 2014.

The purpose of the guidance was to end the use of face-down restraint, which was the sort of restraint used on Seni Lewis. At the time, I was confronted by a lot of people in the sector who said, “You’re not being realistic. You can’t reduce force. You can’t stop the use of face-down restraint, because we deal with very difficult circumstances.” Yet when I listened to progressive practitioners who had worked in such units, they demonstrated that we could end the use of inappropriate forms of restraint. Tim Kendall, national clinical director for mental health, announced that his unit in Sheffield would end the use of face-down restraint, and it did. If those progressive practitioners can do that, others can as well. I was frustrated that guidance issued by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence in 2015 in some ways contradicted the 2014 guidance by not ruling out the use of face-down restraint. I think that was a big mistake by NICE. I realise its independence, but I question its methodology in reaching that conclusion.

Why is this issue so important? It is because many people, not only Olaseni Lewis, have lost their lives as a result of the use of face-down restraint in mental health settings. Along with those awful losses of life, too many people who experience the use of restraint see and feel it as an assault on them. In many cases, people have experienced abuse earlier in their lives, including sexual abuse, sometimes as children. For a woman in a mental health setting, to be held to the floor by several men who are acting to restrain her is likely to make her experience an extraordinary sense of trauma. In many cases that results in a loss of trust between staff and patients. Units that have confronted the culture of a heavy use of force have found that when time is used for creative activity, that reduces the need for force to be used in the first place. Staff end up being safer, as well as patients in their unit, and the unit becomes a more therapeutic environment and everyone benefits.

The bottom line is that since the 2014 guidance there has been very little change—that is why the Bill is so important. The use of face-down restraint is down a little, but the overall use of restraint appears to be at pretty much the same level. That may in part be due to better recording, but the report in The Observer on Sunday suggested that injuries are up. In 2016-17, 3,652 patients and 2,600 staff were injured as a result of the use of force. In many cases, units have close to 100% occupancy and a heavy use of agency staff. They are under enormous strain and stress, which is not a therapeutic environment for patients, and the use of force becomes almost inevitable because of the strain that everyone is under. That is why training is so important in changing the culture.

Let me deal briefly—briefly!—with my amendments. I tabled them because I wished these important issues to be included in the Bill, and it is a pity that they are not. I do not want to delay the passage of the Bill, so I will not seek to divide the House, but I hope that the Minister will give the strongest possible indication that she supports the issues I seek to raise—I think she probably does.

Clause 1 includes a definition of the “use of force”, and it is important to extend that to cover threats of the use of force, and coercion, which means

“the use or threat of force, with the intention of causing fear, alarm or distress to control a patient’s behaviour or elicit compliance with the application of the use of force”.

Such coercion can be enormously traumatic for individuals who have experienced trauma in their lives, and it is important for that to be recognised in the Bill.

Amendment 37 to clause 3 states that the policy on the use of force

“must set out that the use of force will only be used without the sole intention of inflicting pain, suffering or humiliation, or subjecting patients to tortuous, inhumane or degrading treatment, or without inflicting punishment or intimidation.”

That is in line with the Mental Health Act code of practice and the UN convention against torture. I am pleased that the Minister has indicated that she will deal with that in guidance, but I hope very much that it will be very clear in that guidance. If it had been on the face of the Bill, it would have helped to address the concerns of the special rapporteur on torture.

Amendment 36 would ensure that mental health units committed to reducing the overall use of force—surely that is ultimately the central purpose of the Bill—and it would increase transparency about how they intended to achieve that and what types of force were permissible in the unit. All that is absolutely central to more personalised care whereby people are informed about what might happen to them in in-patient units.

Amendment 38 to clause 4 would ensure that people’s legal rights to advocacy were properly communicated to them in relation to the use of force. People often simply do not know what their rights are, and the amendment would assist by ensuring that they did.

Amendment 79 to clause 5 addresses the importance of training in the appropriate use of force. It makes it clear that the

“Secretary of State must publish quality standards for training”.

That is important because training practices are variable around the country. My preference would be for accredited trainers, so that we know that they meet the right standard and are training staff in the right way. My proposal would at least ensure that there was a national standard that people should abide by.

Amendments 80 and 81 are intended to ensure that training requirements for staff include training in trauma-informed care. That comes back to the absolute importance, when we are caring for people, of recognising the impact that trauma has had on people’s lives. It is great that clause 5(2)(g) covers training on experience of trauma, but it should be strengthened to cover not only the impact of trauma on patients’ mental and physical health, but how the use of force itself can re-traumatise people—the very opposite of what should be happening when they are receiving mental health care and treatment. Trauma-informed care is a model of care that is

“grounded in and directed by a complete understanding of how trauma exposure affects”

a person’s

“neurological, biological, psychological and social development”.

In clause 7, on the recording of the use of force, amendment 39 would improve the transparency and accountability about the use of force by ensuring consistency in the recording of all uses of force, not just those above a threshold set in statutory guidance. The Bill as it stands states that records should not have to cover the “negligible” use of force. I understand entirely why that is in the Bill, but the concern is that guidance will be interpreted differently. That is why the way the guidance is framed will be of critical importance. There is a risk of low-level micro-aggressions—uses of force in a minor way but on a continuing basis below the radar—which can have an impact on people’s wellbeing and their potential for recovery, which is out of step with the Mental Health Act code of practice.

Clause 9 is on the annual report by the Secretary of State. According to the related amendments, the annual report should

“make reference to the annual statistics”

published by NHS Digital, including relevant characteristics, so that we can monitor the ethnicity of people against whom force is used, and they state that the Secretary of State should report on that and that there should be a statement to Parliament.

I do not want to take up any more time. I will end by saying that I absolutely hope that the Bill gets on to the statute book as quickly as possible. I hope that the Minister will respond to it becoming law by going on a drive nationally to proselytise and make the case for a change of culture, so that we can see a radical reduction in the use of force across mental health settings. There are very many inspiring practitioners who have demonstrated how that is possible, but we need to make sure that it is the standard and not the exception. The Minister could go down in history for achieving a dramatic cultural change if she takes the Bill, when it is passed, and really goes out and makes the case for it.

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[Jackie Doyle-Price]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. I hope that we will continue to consider everything that we can do to support people, and I welcome those suggestions. Ultimately, such people are facing massive injustice at the hands of the state, and we should never stop looking at what we can do to support people in those circumstances. The simple truth is that those people have put their trust in the institutes of the state, so there is double pain when they are failed by them, and we must ensure that we do everything possible.

I hope that what I have said about legal aid and the investigation process satisfies the hon. Member for Croydon North, so I hope that he will not press his amendments to a Division so that we can get the Bill into the other place and deliver the objectives that he and I both want.

To clarify something that I was saying about the Government amendments, we unwittingly included a loophole that would allow institutions not to provide patients with information, and I might have suggested that that was a matter of discretion. However, it is actually in the Bill that they must provide information unless “the patient refuses” to accept it. I just wanted to make that clear in case there was any misunderstanding. The remaining Government amendments are largely technical, linking the Bill with the Data Protection Act 2018, for example, and providing clearer definitions regarding mental health units. Those are very much drafting changes, and I hope that the House will approve them.

Turning to the amendments tabled by my hon. Friends the Member for Christchurch and for Shipley and the right hon. Member for North Norfolk, I have already discussed the Government’s view on such matters, but I will refer first to the right hon. Gentleman’s amendments in relation to threats and coercion. The Government’s main concern is that putting the use of threats of force and coercion on the face of the Bill might cause confusion for staff working in mental health units when we are trying to encourage them to use de-escalation techniques. We have the same objective as the right hon. Gentleman, which is to minimise restraint, but we are concerned that the amendments might act as an impediment to what we are trying to achieve.

[Norman Lamb]

Will the Minister look at whether the guidance will be clear about the importance of staff not inappropriately threatening force or coercion, because that all goes down to the culture of the organisation?

[Jackie Doyle-Price]

The right hon. Gentleman is right about that, so let me go through the provisions we think are in place to protect patients from exactly that circumstance. The care quality regulations—the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014—clearly set out the types of behaviours that are prohibited and create an offence of failing to comply with the requirement to protect service users from those behaviours. We are satisfied that those provisions would be an appropriate tool with which to tackle this issue. Clearly, we will be relying on guidance to implement much of this Bill, and I can give him every assurance that these issues will be very much part of that guidance; this process will be consultative and I am sure he will want to remind me of the undertaking I have just given him as and when that comes through.

My hon. Friend the Member for Shipley has discussed his amendments 44 to 78, providing us with his understanding of the use of the terms “force” and “restraint”. The point he made was that he wanted the Bill to be consistent with language used elsewhere in mental health settings. It is important that we make sure the language we use is consistent. The term “force” is a more overarching description of what is happening to a patient, and the individual elements that the definition needs to cover are the types of restraint. In the context of this Bill, those are physical, mechanical and chemical restraint, along with isolation. We have chosen to use the term “force” because it works alongside the Mental Health Act 1983 code of practice, with which practitioners are familiar, and it reduces any risk of confusing the drafting due to the use of similar terms, where that can be avoided. This approach has very much been accepted in our consultation with the sector. I heard my hon. Friend say that he had received representations to suggest the opposite, so I would be pleased to take that up with him offline, in order to satisfy his local care trust that what we are doing is consistent with other law, because it is important that we take everyone with us.

My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch has tabled amendments that would remove certain types of force from the Bill, particularly chemical restraint and isolation, which covers segregation and seclusion. I am grateful to him for testing our conscience via these amendments, because it is entirely legitimate for him to worry that practitioners might be impeded from administering medication to their patients, as, obviously, that would be harmful if those patients needed it. I can give him the assurance that when we talk about “chemical restraint”, we are not considering a patient’s normal medication. The type of medication used for chemical restraint would usually be different from that used as part of a patient’s normal medication to control or treat their mental health condition. As part of a chemical restraint, patients would not simply be given more of their medication. The types of medication used in chemical restraint are a particular kind of product, lasting for only a short period and not having the effect of over-medicating a patient. It is important that we record and receive national data on the use of those products so that we understand their use and shine a light on areas where they might not be used appropriately. I hope that gives him some comfort.

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[Jackie Doyle-Price]

We will undertake it speedily and it will be made public, but, as my hon. Friend will appreciate, the whole purpose of consultation is that it consults and we want to ensure that we are taking everybody with us. Personally, I will want to do it in an extremely timely fashion.

There are many amendments to go through, but I hope that I have articulated the Government’s overall support for this measure and what we are trying to achieve in terms of supporting the hon. Gentleman’s Bill. Central to all this is the need to underline transparency and to strengthen accountability so that patients are protected. Clearly, we desire to minimise the use of force. The best way that we can achieve that is by shining a light on those incidents. We will continue to take this forward in the spirit of openness, and the Secretary of State will be producing reports on how this is being implemented.

Let me turn now to my final point. I have already addressed this in response to the remarks of my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley. On police body cameras, I can give him this assurance: the proposal does not create a criminal offence for not wearing a body camera. We have been very deliberate in our language to say that it is practicable to make sure that we do not get in the way of the police doing what is right in these situations. The references he makes to the law are consistent with the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, but this would not raise any issue of a police officer being faced with criminal prosecution for not wearing a camera. I hope that that gives him some satisfaction.

[Norman Lamb]

This is my very final point. Even if this is not in the Bill, does the Minister agree that it would be a good thing if the Secretary of State reported to Parliament annually on the basis of the data that was produced by NHS Digital?

[Jackie Doyle-Price]

That issue did come up in Committee. Although I appreciate the spirit with which the right hon. Gentleman makes that inquiry, we would not want to make a particular arrangement for one set of NHS data over another. Clearly, we need to explore this issue to make sure that there is some annual return on how this Bill operates when it becomes an Act.

I could say so much more, Mr Deputy Speaker, but I will not. Everybody in this House is very clear that they want this Bill to make progress. I appreciate that I cannot keep all Members happy all the time, but I do hope that I have been able to assure my hon. Friends the Members for Shipley and for Christchurch on how we will take forward their representations and that I can persuade them not to push their amendments to a vote.

Mental Health Units (Use of Force) Bill

Norman Lamb Excerpts

3rd reading: House of Commons
Friday 6th July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Norman Lamb (North Norfolk) (LD)]

I speak briefly to confirm my very strong support for this Bill, to congratulate the hon. Member for Croydon North (Mr Reed) on pursuing it, and to pay tribute to the extraordinary stoicism of Seni’s parents, Mr and Mrs Lewis. I am not sure whether they are here today, but we owe it to them that something good comes from the tragedy of the loss of their son. When I was a Minister, I published new guidance aimed at ending the use of prone restraint—the sort of restraint used on Seni Lewis—and radically reducing the use of other restraint.

Depressingly, although it may in part be due to better reporting, the data shows very little change in the overall use of force in mental health units across the country. The truth is that force is endemic in many in-patient units. However, we also know that many units have managed to reduce the use of force substantially.

On therapeutic care and recovery, we have to confront, as a country, the use of force in our mental health units and, if we do not do that, we will never achieve the ambition of facilitating recovery for people who have experienced mental ill health. Frequently, people who find themselves in mental health units have suffered abuse in their life. For a woman who has suffered abuse, restraint, with many people holding her down to the floor, is just a repeat of that abuse. Such restraint destroys trust between staff and patient and completely undermines therapeutic care.

It is possible to achieve a much greater reduction in the use of force. This Bill, particularly through the transparency and accountability it brings, will be enormously beneficial in seeking to change that culture. I strongly support the Bill for that reason.