Mental Health Units (Use of Force) Bill

Victoria Prentis Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons
Friday 3rd November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)]

I am most grateful to have been called first, Mr Speaker, out of the smorgasbord of choice available to you.

It gives me genuine pleasure to rise to support the Bill and to be the first to congratulate the hon. Member for Croydon North (Mr Reed) on his hard work. The Bill stems from great tragedy, but it is always good to see a piece of constituency casework come to fruition and get as far as the Floor of the House. I have enormous respect for the hon. Gentleman, and the all the work he has done with people across the House and outside to get this far. I wish him all the best.

[Wera Hobhouse]

Is it not also time to pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb), who as Health Minister introduced the “Positive and Safe” guidelines, a two-year programme with funding to end the deliberate use of face-down restraint in all health and care settings? Unfortunately, those guidelines have not always been followed.

[Victoria Prentis]

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention. It is very important in these cases to congratulate Members from across the House and to work together on cross-party lines to achieve the consensus needed, so we support those in our communities who need laws like this to keep them safe.

[Michael Tomlinson (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (Con)]

May I add my voice to my hon. Friend’s in congratulating the promoter of the Bill on not just bringing it to the House but gathering a consensus? Does she, like me, welcome the fact that he is willing to look at constructive suggestions in Committee to ensure the Bill is in a proper and fit state?

[Victoria Prentis]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. We have begun to understand and talk about mental health only very recently. As we do so, we learn both from those patients who have suffered tragedies and those who have had better experiences with law enforcement agencies. It is important that we learn and listen as the debate progresses. Issues may well come up in Committee that nobody has given a moment’s thought to. A constituent will have a story to tell and we can learn from it as we go forward.

From my own constituency casework, I know that for those at the point of crisis the use of restraint can be both humiliating and traumatising. I discussed this issue with the Causeway Carers, a great organisation comprised largely of parents and other family members of victims with very severe mental health problems. They meet in Bicester once a month. Many have first-hand experience of sectioning and restraint, which they shared with me. That was a great privilege and I do not feel able to share any of those stories with the House today. From what we have heard about Seni, we can all imagine the sort of stories that are taking place even on the high street in Bicester from time to time, often at night. They are also taking place in all our communities. They are not isolated stories, and none of us can feel that we are untouched by them.

These families are suffering enormously because they are dealing with a very ill family member, often a child, and restraint is added to that dreadful suffering that they already have to cope with. I recognise that the use of police cells in England as places of safety under the Mental Health Act 1983 is declining, and that more cases than ever are now referred to health-based places of safety, which is real progress. We should also welcome the significant reduction in the number of deaths in, or following, police custody since 20 years ago. I imagine that this reflects improved training, guidance and practices in a number of areas, most significantly in suicide prevention. My background is as a lawyer for the Prison Service, and it strikes me that this is in sharp contrast to the dramatic and worrying rise in suicide rates recorded in the last 20 years in prisons.

[Clive Lewis (Norwich South) (Lab)]

We are being consensual across the House, and I would like to retain that spirit, but would also make the point that one of the linking factors in terms of both prisons and mental health is funding for the institutions. Staff and service users at the Norfolk and Suffolk mental health trust, which is in special measures, are concerned that a reduction in the number of staff—nurses and doctors—over the past five years means they have less ability to watch and monitor patients, so it is more likely that those patients are using medication, and that means restraint is more likely to be used, so we end up with the situation that the Lewis family were in. Will the hon. Lady comment on that?

[Victoria Prentis]

Rather than get too party political, I think it is appropriate to talk about other difficulties that have led to reductions in staffing in real terms in the Prison Service, because we on this side of the House can give lots of facts and figures about how much more is being spent. The difficulty that I know about personally now in my Banbury constituency is in recruiting and retraining staff—not with the money to pay for them, but with finding the right people. I pay tribute to all who choose to work in the very difficult mental health sphere, with patients who suffer from dreadful illnesses; the House should pay tribute to the work they do day in, day out with people who are often very difficult to deal with while they are ill.

One matter on which I am sure we can agree is the importance of reducing further the number of black, Asian and minority ethnic people detained for mental health reasons in police cells. The figures are disproportionately high. It simply cannot be right that black people are four times more likely to be detained under the 1983 Act than white people. The hon. Member for Croydon North mentioned the Angiolini review and the importance of standardised data recording. I apologise for again referring to my Prison Service experience, as the mental health system is completely different from the criminal justice system, but there are themes that run through the way BAME people are treated in both systems which we increasingly find utterly unacceptable.

[Victoria Atkins (Louth and Horncastle) (Con)]

I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Croydon North (Mr Reed) for bringing the Bill to the House. Does my hon. Friend join me in welcoming clauses 8 and 9 requiring mental health units to record the relevant characteristics of the patient on every occasion in which force is used, and to submit an annual report to the Secretary of State, so that health units and also the Secretary of State can review and understand where there are patterns of behaviour?

[Victoria Prentis]

I could not agree more. The provision of statistics and retention of figures and then the crunching of them is vital. It might not sound exciting, but it is the only way to deal with the big problem of racial imbalance in both the mental health and the criminal justice system. It sounds absurd to say that figures are what will push through action on racial imbalances, but I truly believe that facts and figures—such as those provided recently in the report on the Prison Service, where we learned that 277 black women are in prison for every 100 white women—will help achieve that. Such figures are unacceptable on any level. The more we can talk about such figures, backed up by good evidence, the better. A civilised society cannot put up with such things.

I have strayed far from my brief. I am proud that the Government have committed to addressing the disproportionately high rates of BAME people detained for mental health reasons, and I am proud of the work the Government have done generally on mental health.

We all know that the 1983 Act is outdated, and it will be reformed to make it fit for the modern era. In October 2017, the Prime Minister announced a comprehensive review of the Act, with a planned end date for the report of autumn 2018. I am pleased that the review is being led by Professor Simon Wessely, former president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. I worked closely with him in my previous role. We were working on a case concerning the pardoning of first world war prisoners who had been shot for cowardice, and he was able to recreate their mental health states from the limited records we had available and give invaluable evidence to the court. He is a great man and I am sure he is the right person to lead this review. He has said that he expects some of the solutions to the difficulties in the mental health system to lie in practice, leadership and culture, as well as in potential legislative change.

I have been encouraged by the work on mental health in my constituency, including in the veterans support group. It meets at Behind the Wire in Heyford Park, next to my constituency office, about once a month. It is a former military establishment and the veterans who access it feel very comfortable in that environment. It is well known that veterans as a group are more prone to experience mental health issues. This particular group offers drop-ins for veterans living in the local area so they can meet organisations including the Support, Empower, Advocate, Promote service, Help for Heroes, the Royal British Legion, Veterans UK and Rethink Mental Illness, which the hon. Member for Croydon North mentioned, and which does a great deal of good work across the country.

I have other local organisations who are doing great things in supporting my constituents, including Restore in Banbury, which I was also lucky enough to meet recently. I visited the local branch of Mind in September, which has contacted me in recent days urging me to support the Bill. Its letter said that

“the proposals in this Bill are crucial to protecting people experiencing a mental health crisis...With your support this Bill would lead to better training for staff, better data, improving transparency and highlighting problem areas”.

It therefore gives me great pleasure not only to support the hon. Member for Croydon North, but to stand up for those of my constituents who have asked me to attend this debate and to speak in it.

As a former civil servant, I cannot emphasise enough how important it is that we have a joined-up approach across Departments. It is very much not just a matter for the Department of Health; the Ministry of Justice is also involved. I speak to it frequently about mental health and prisoners and the use of restraint in the criminal justice system, and I hope that the Minister will reaffirm the importance of cross-governmental co-operation, including work with NHS England, on the delivery of reforms to detention.