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Mental Health Bill [HL]

I am grateful to the noble Lord. I shall speak only to Amendment No. 28. The purpose of Amendment No. 28 is to provide for better case management in court when there are issues about the mental health of those who are remanded on bail. If the amendment—or something very close to it—is adopted, it should provide for better and more reliable results, and more profound assessments of mental health in court. It is very common for psychiatric reports to be prepared for a court when somebody is awaiting sentence. That is usually done on the application of the defence. Perhaps the Minister should know that there are sometimes funding difficulties in obtaining medical reports in certain cases. It is often difficult for solicitors to obtain prior authority for the funding of such reports, and sometimes they have to take the risk, albeit on the advice of counsel, that such reports should be obtained. They are not always paid for and sometimes the solicitors have to carry the expense. The amendment would enable the judge to decide whether, in his or her opinion, there is a requirement for a medical report, particularly dealing with the kinds of issues with which the Bill and the Mental Health Act 1983 are concerned. Proposed new subsection (5) is of especial potential assistance. It would permit the court to specify any matters to be included in the report and, in particular, an assessment of the risk posed by the defendant to members of the public. The Committee will be aware that the Government have introduced a new form of sentence, the IPP—imprisonment for public protection. This is an indeterminate sentence, which occasionally has given rise to press controversy because, although the IPP is passed, the judge is in effect required to specify the minimum period which he or she thinks the defendant should serve. When passing an IPP, the judge is specifically required to assess the risk or dangerousness posed by the defendant. Giving the court the statutory power to specify particular matters to be included in the report would, in my view, be of especial assistance in dealing with IPPs. There is also the issue of the difference between defendants who are remanded in custody for mental health reports under Section 35 of the 1983 Act and defendants who are remanded on bail. This provision would place people who are remanded on bail in an equivalent position to those who are remanded in custody. It would enable the court to obtain exactly the kind of assessment in relation to a person on bail that it would obtain if that person were remanded in custody. A realistic assessment of people while on bail may be easier to carry out when they are in their normal residential conditions—perhaps at home with a caring family—than if they have to be remanded in custody, which can be frightening and disorientating and is not always necessary for the person concerned. In addition, when there are remands in custody for reports, there are sometimes substantial delays, which cause real frustration to judges. Some of that frustration would be alleviated if defendants were remanded on bail for this purpose. I should perhaps declare the interest of being a Crown Court recorder and having many friends, associates and colleagues—some of them falling into all three categories—who are judges. I beg to move.