The Government’s attempts to modernise mental health legislation will “not solve every problem” but mark a “vital step” in improving quality of care, according to Wes Streeting.
The Health Secretary said attitudes to mental health have “come on leaps and bounds” since the Mental Health Act 1983 before warning that the law has been “frozen in time”.
Patients would be given a greater say over their care and treatment under the terms of the Mental Health Bill tabled in Parliament.
Other changes include ensuring that detention and compulsory treatment are only undertaken when necessary, with provision for more frequent reviews and appeals, and limiting the time people with autism or a learning disability can be detained.
The Bill has already been scrutinised in the House of Lords and it cleared its first hurdle in the Commons on Monday evening, when MPs approved it at second reading.
Mr Streeting told MPs: “The measure of a society is how it treats its most vulnerable citizens. When it comes to the treatment of people with serious mental illness, we are falling well short of the humane, compassionate society we aspire to be.
“Patients live 15 to 20 years shorter lives than the average. They are often accommodated far away from their family and loved ones.
“The facilities they are housed in can be completely unsuitable. Lord Darzi found during his investigation last year nearly 20 patients in a mental health facility forced to share two showers and live amongst an infestation of rats and cockroaches.
“Patients are denied the basic choice and agency that is awarded to NHS patients with physical illnesses. People from ethnic minority communities, and especially black African and Caribbean men, are more than three times as likely to be sectioned.
“Although they are very different conditions, people with a learning disability or autistic people are often lumped in with those who have mental illness – reflecting an outdated lack of medical understanding.”
Mr Streeting added: “While attitudes to mental health have come on leaps and bounds in the past four decades, the law has been frozen in time.
“As a result, the current legislation fails to give patients adequate dignity, voice and agency in their care.
“This is despite the fact that patients themselves have consistently told us that being treated humanely and making decisions about their own care plays a vital role in their recovery.
“When patients are detained and treated without any say over what is happening to them, it can have serious consequences for their ongoing health.”
Mr Streeting went on: “This Bill does not solve every problem in our mental health services, but it marks a vital step in our plans to improve the quality of care, combat long-standing inequalities and bring about a stronger focus on prevention and early intervention in mental health.”
Mr Streeting said mental health professionals will “have to consider the risk of serious harm when making decisions to detain” which will ensure “any risks to the public and patients are considered as part of the assessment process”.
He said: “The vast majority of people with mental illness, including severe mental illness, present no risk to themselves or others and for the majority of people, treatment can be provided without compulsion.
“However, there are some people whose illness, when acutely unwell, can make them a risk to themselves and sometimes to others.
“No one knows this better than the families of Ian Coates, Barnaby Webber or Grace O’Malley Kumar, the victims of Valdo Calocane’s violent rampage in Nottingham, whose campaign for justice and accountability has been truly awe inspiring, or indeed the family of Valdo Calocane, who I have also spent time with listening to their experience of feeling badly let down by health services.
“As the independent investigation into the murders found, both he and his victims were failed by the health service, and the families are left to live through the consequences in a level of pain the rest of us could scarcely imagine.”
Shadow health secretary Ed Argar welcomed the Bill, saying it’s “not only important but right that our laws are updated to reflect the modern world and the knowledge we have today”.
He said: “I believe it is right that we took the time to get this right. That work updating the Mental Health Act started under the previous government, and we had a commitment in our election manifesto to update the laws in this area, and that is something that has been carried on by the new government, and we continue to believe this is the right thing to do.
“So I want to put on record our in principle, support for the Government in this legislation.”
He told MPs the Conservative “welcome efforts to improve the patient’s voice involvement in their own care” through “greater use of advanced choice documents”.
The Bill will undergo further scrutiny at a later date.
