Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will make an assessment of the compatibility of the Mental Capacity Act (Amendment) Bill with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

The Mental Capacity (Amendment) Bill will replace the current ‘Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards’ system for protecting people who are deprived of their liberty in England and Wales with a new more robust, efficient and streamlined system, the Liberty Protection Safeguards. The current system has left over 125,000 people without access to protections they are entitled to. The more efficient Liberty Protection Safeguards system will allow people to access the protections they are entitled to more quickly and will therefore be beneficial to many vulnerable people including disabled people. The Department published its’ equality impact assessment for the Bill in December 2018. That assessment outlines that people with a disability, as defined in the Equality Act 2010 will as a group, benefit from these reforms.

The United Kingdom Government supported the development of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) and was one of the first countries to sign it. The Bill is considered to be in line with the principles of the UNCPRD. Supported decision making is already a principle of the Mental Capacity Act, and this remains the case if the Bill is passed. The Bill also supports respecting a person’s inherent dignity, in line with Article 3 of the UNCRPD, by putting a person’s wishes and feelings at the centre and thus ensuring that their inherent dignity is respected.