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Mental Health Bill [HL]

I come to Amendment No. 7 from a very different position from those we have heard about so far. I have heard the arguments about patients’ rights, and I agree with those. I have a history of supporting patients’ rights, and I will go on doing so. One of the things that make this area so incredibly difficult to legislate on, however, is that there is a balance of rights. Rights are not a one-way street. There are also the rights of the people immediately affected by the patient and the rights of the community in which they live. I shall say a little more about that, not only because it is relevant to the nature of this clause, but also in the context of my criticism that the Government’s approach on this does not go far enough. We are not facing the difficult question of what you do when an individual, whether through a personality disorder or other problems, is frightening and difficult for the community to deal with and yet there is no willingness to treat them. That is what this is about. I want to take the Committee back a bit. I touched on this when I made a relatively short contribution on Monday. In the period prior to the 1959 Act, our hospitals acted in a way as containment centres.