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Mental Health Bill [Lords]

I shall speak broadly in favour of the Government position and against the amendments tabled by the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Angela Browning) and her allies, largely because I have been going out and talking to people in Hackney—practitioners, users and residents who live alongside mental health patients in the community who are not always receiving the treatment that they need. I mentioned that on Second Reading and subsequently, but it has not been voiced enough in the debate. Some of those patients will be bounced back into hospital because their needs are severe. Some do not necessarily need to be in hospital, but they need an element of compulsion to deliver their treatment. I am not blindly following the Minister’s lead on the matter. I have come to my own conclusion that treatment on the basis of need should be what drives our treatment of people in need of mental health services. That principle pervades the national health service in other areas. The difficulty with mental health is that not everyone can identify their needs, and even if they can, they are sometimes unable, for various reasons, to adhere to treatment voluntarily. I have spoken to users about this on a couple of occasions. I heard mixed views from them, but they did not rule out compulsory community treatment orders completely. Some said that they would rather have one as an alternative to hospital treatment because it would allow them to continue their family life and their work. Moreover, crucially, it is less stigmatising than removal to hospital, whereby someone is suddenly taken away from their home environment and family, and perhaps away from their workplace if they are able to hold down a job, for a period of time. That identifies them as a mental health patient, whereas in other circumstances they could say that they were in hospital for an operation, without having to go into specifics. There was a common and clear view from the mental health service users to whom I spoke, thanks to Hackney Mind and its user group, that compulsion was entirely acceptable if the behaviour of somebody with a mental health problem led to police involvement. That was a universal view, admittedly not from a scientifically representative group of people, but from a group of mental health service users to whom I spoke in preparation for the Committee stage of the Bill. Interestingly—I hope that the Minister has heard this from users too—they were more concerned about consistency, quality and communications in relation to community care in general. The compulsion element was obviously part of our debate, but it was mainly about the quality of community services. If we are to have CTOs, we should also have better community services alongside them, so that someone does not have to have a CTO in order to get the services that they need, but can pick up services in the community as well.