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Mental Health Bill [HL]

This has been a good debate. I say right at the beginning that I have no disagreement whatever with how noble Lords have expressed their comments about the need to develop services. It seems to me that the one thing on which the House is united in our debates on mental health is our belief in the importance of mental health services and our wish to strengthen them. We wish, as noble Lords have suggested, to have early intervention and to see that the tragedy of the million people with mental health problems who are on incapacity benefit is put to an end. We are all united in wishing to see that happen. I rather wish that noble Lords might have given the Government a little credit for some of the developments in the last few years. The noble Baroness, Lady Neuberger, by pointing to crisis intervention teams and so on, has illustrated some of the improvements. The noble Earl, Lord Howe, put his finger on the real question: is this amendment the right way of fulfilling our desire to improve services, access, rights and so on? That is the point on which I disagree with noble Lords. I disagree for two reasons. First, the public’s rights on assessment and service provision are already covered in general legislation. Secondly, while I know that noble Lords here tonight would wish to prioritise mental health services above all other services—for I suspect that that is the implication of what they are saying—we also have to look at the impact of identifying simply mental health services and putting strict duties on to local providers, when similar duties will not be placed—