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Mental Health Bill [Lords]

I will take only a few minutes because I understand that the Minister will want time to respond to the debate. However, I want to deal with a couple of points that were raised. I realise that I was not a member of the Public Bill Committee. Many hon. Members who have participated in the debate have taken a great deal of interest in the Bill and have spoken about its details with knowledge. I speak for no one but myself. The hon. Member for Stockport (Ann Coffey) claims that given that there is a definition relating to capacity in clause 27—she said that that measure related to consent to treatment, but it is actually on electroconvulsive therapy—any other definition in the Bill relating to capacity should use the same wording for the sake of consistency. However, that would be wrong, because it would mean that the test for admission would be the same as the test for ECT. As she probably knows better than me, given that she has followed the Bill’s passage, the architecture of the Bill is such that ECT has a higher threshold of incapacity than mere sectioning because anyone who was sectioned could otherwise have ECT administered to them. Although there might be merit in pure consistency, the example that she cited did not work because her point would undermine the separate threshold for ECT that exists for not only historical reasons, but clinical ones.