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Mental Health Bill [HL]

We have seriously overrun our time, and I am sure that noble Lords will thank me for being brief. The Minister’s reply was not unexpected but it was disappointing. I was disappointed that none of what was said so powerfully by the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, or the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, made any impact. The Minister took a very purist line. What we have heard in evidence from the real world, described by the noble Baroness and the noble Lord, was, I hoped, enough to stall her in her tracks, but that proved to be a fond hope. What she said did not appear to me to be based on the real world; indeed, her reply to the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, seemed largely circular. She talked about not excluding people who drink habitually and have withdrawal symptoms. That is exactly the group that the Government are excluding from the Bill—that is what alcohol-dependence means. The Government’s position on this issue is extremely confused. The key question is whether the Bill should be used for moral control of, for example, drunkenness, fetishism, and so on, or for the treatment of people who are ill. The Bill should be used to treat people who are ill. I was very struck by the story told by the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy. Twenty years ago a psychiatrist of my acquaintance asked a Russian psychiatrist whether people who tried to escape were detained in Soviet mental hospitals. The psychiatrist said yes, but only if the person was mentally ill—but only a mentally ill person would try to leave the Soviet Union. That was the kind of distortion of professional ethics to be found there. The noble Lord, Lord Soley, spoke extremely powerfully, but I return to my earlier point about perception and trust. If you have people in the black and ethnic minority communities who simply do not trust the system as they find it because of real discrimination, something has to be done. It is a feature of the legislation of all Commonwealth jurisdictions that I know of for there to be exclusions; it is part of the way in which legislation that deprives people of their basic rights needs to be confined. I include in that all the Australian states, New Zealand, Ireland, Scotland and at least some of the Canadian jurisdictions. The noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, said that this amendment was about stopping detention creep. That is a very good way of putting it; its aim is to prevent inappropriate detention. As the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, put it, we are in danger of driving into the net a large number of people who should not be there. This is a set of issues to which I am sure we will have to return. In the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment, by leave, withdrawn. [Amendment No. 5 not moved.] Clause 3 agreed to.