---

Mental Health Bill [HL]

I certainly accept that progress has been made, the most obvious being the transfer of responsibility for health in prisons to the National Health Service. But that has not produced a proportionate result in people who are mentally ill being transferred out of prison into mental health establishments. That is the issue I was addressing earlier and which leads me to the view that prisons will soon be a surrogate for psychiatric hospitals. In relation to Clause 29, I say, with great respect, that the Minister’s last point was a false one. He is suggesting that if the Government were to accept the amendment, mental health trusts would go running to the Government and effectively pass the responsibility for decision making to them. That misses the point of the amendment, which is designed to avoid a real situation that—despite whatever improvements there have been—arises in Crown Courts up and down England and Wales on a regular basis, certainly on a weekly basis, possibly on a daily basis. One of the aims of the amendment is to ensure that mental health trusts would understand clearly that they have a duty to respond to sound case management by judges. On the whole, judges exercise rational decisions about how to progress cases. If a judge requires a particular form of report relating to the mental condition of someone who is appearing before him but finds that that intention is frustrated by no hospital being made available to deal with that intention, then nothing less than compulsion on the National Health Service to answer the judge’s questions is satisfactory. It would make for far better case management.