Mental Health Bill [HL]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend on his amendment. I think it is basically right, but he will be aware that I have always taken the view that principles in a Bill are not a good idea. We always need to remember that courts of law are required to interpret Acts of Parliament and if you end up balancing clauses with principles, you open the door to some interesting legal squabbles which, in my experience, are usually very expensive for the taxpayer. That brings me to the warning point on this. I like the way it has been approached and it is right that we have sought to meet the concerns of Members of this House on the issue. But my word of caution is to ask that we have the lawyers check out the way the code is worded because, as my noble friend will remember, it was only a few years ago that the NHS was paying out large sums of money in out-of-court settlements because the health service feared that if it went to court, even though it felt that its case was good, it would cost it much more than settling out of court. If we ask people to balance a code with the requirements of the Act, there is a danger of reopening that door, which has in recent years been closed. That does not in any way imply that people should not be able to go to the courts if they feel that aspects of the Act have not been fully and properly dealt with, and that their rights have not been acknowledged. But it is a warning that this can be an expensive way of meeting that need. We have all known for many years the over-representation of certain ethnic-minority groups within patients having compulsory treatment. There are at least three areas that we need to address. One is the recognition that social and economic factors, not least racism itself, put extra pressures on some groups within the ethnic-minority community to the extent that they either exacerbate or trigger a mental illness. That is a wider social issue. Secondly, certain sections of the ethnic-minority groups are seriously under-represented in the professions themselves. Perhaps we could put on the record again that it is high time that some of these professional groups took a leaf out of the Army’s book. When it realised what a serious problem it had, it began to go around schools, clubs and other organisations in ethnic-minority areas to make a far greater effort to recruit and educate people about opportunities, whether in psychiatric nursing or medicine. The professions to some extent have responsibility here. The third factor, which I hope will not be taken out of context, has to be addressed by the Government. It is hard to believe that there is not an element of institutional racism in this context. The concerns that have rightly worried those on all Benches may be dealt with more effectively by addressing those areas than by drawing up codes, which are useful but whose effectiveness should not be overestimated.