Mental Health Bill [Lords]

Well, here we are again, and I hope that this will be the last time. I welcome the Minister to his new mental health brief. He is the last man standing in the Department of Health Front-Bench team, and he has joined one of the most challenging pieces of legislation ever to go through his Department at the very last corner. He has done well on his timing there. I should also like to pay tribute to his predecessor, the right hon. Member for Doncaster, Central (Ms Winterton), who was with the Bill almost as long as I have been with it, and to my colleague in the House of Lords, the noble Earl Howe, who has an equally longstanding association with the Bill and with the whole issue of mental health. The fact that we are considering amendments that were agreed by all sides in the Lords shows that the Opposition were right to say on Second Reading and on Report that although a lot of progress had been made—we welcomed the amendments that the Government agreed to on youth-appropriate treatment, the treatability test and advocacy—there was a little further to go. The Lords have demonstrated that there were further concessions to be wrung out of the Government, so we were right not to give the Bill our full endorsement at that stage. We can now scrutinise these further amendments. This has been a worthwhile, if elongated, exercise over what now amounts to about eight years. We still have doubts as to whether the amendments to which the Government have agreed go far enough. We would like to have seen the impaired decision making amendments that were placed in the Bill in the Lords retained. To quote my noble Friend, Earl Howe:"““To have acknowledged in law that there is a place for the wishes and feelings of patients who are capable of making their own choices would have been a profoundly far-sighted and beneficial change.””—[Official Report, House of Lords, 2 July 2004; Vol. 693, c. 826.]" I welcome the Minister’s opening comment that one of his missions in his new brief was to root out stigma, but we believe that the provisions on impaired decision making might have played an important part in achieving that.