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Mental Health Bill [HL]

I have a couple of additional points. Most of the points have been made, but I want strongly to back the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, on the history of non-compliance as regards medication. That issue is central. It does not appear in the legislation and, to the best of my knowledge, it does not appear in the code of practice. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Warner, that the reason why there is opposition to the measure is twofold. First, treatment may be given in the least restrictive setting, but it is still compulsion. That is at the heart of much of the opposition. Secondly, the evidence base is unclear. He will know that for some months his former department has been sitting on a paper containing evidence of the effectiveness of community treatment orders which it has not published. The fact that the department brings forward such a serious and widely drawn piece of legislation that will have an impact on large numbers of people without its own evidence base is naturally a cause for suspicion. Can the Minister tell us when that evidence is likely to be published? I want to mention the code of practice in two respects. Paragraph 12A.23 sets out the conditions as they appear in the Bill, but at the end there is a telling phrase. It states: "““The above is not an exhaustive list of conditions which may be applied—there may be others depending on the patient’s individual circumstances””." Therefore, it is not just that we are going to compel people to abstain from certain conduct; it is that these CTOs may be widened, using the code of practice, in any way that clinicians see fit. It is a remarkable statement to appear in a code of practice. Finally, under the code of practice there is a requirement on practitioners that if they are to grant leave of absence for more than seven consecutive days, the responsible clinician should first consider whether the patient should go on to SCT. Why? If the issue is about compliance, if it is based on the judgment of the clinician, why should they have to do that? There will be patients for whom leave of absence is the best therapy treatment; there will be patients for whom SCT may be the best therapeutic basis. The existence of that statement leaves one to suspect that there is a strong possibility that SCTs will become the preferred option for clinicians and that they will be allowed to get away with it whether or not it is appropriate. Those are just a few of the very many reasons why this idea is probably one of the most unpopular that the Government have proposed in a very long time.