Mental Health Bill [Lords]

With the leave of the House, Madam Deputy Speaker, I shall respond to some of the points made during the debate. There have been some constructive contributions. It is difficult to respond to the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), but I pay tribute to him for the way in which, I am told, he led for Her Majesty’s Opposition during the deliberations on the Bill. I thank him for his congratulations on my new responsibilities, which I hold alongside my responsibilities for adult social care. The hon. Gentleman asked about monitoring the changes with specific regard to members of black and minority ethnic communities. I assure him that we shall be monitoring the measures, including their impact on people from those communities, extremely closely. However, the existing mental health, criminal justice and education systems raise massive issues for our society in terms of relative access to services, relative deprivation and underperformance, some of which have to do with ethnicity. The changes that we propose will do nothing to make that situation worse, and will indeed make it better, so it is slightly disingenuous to suggest that there are no diversity issues or problems for people from ethnic minority communities in the existing mental health system. We have to address such issues irrespective of the changes we are making in the Bill. The hon. Gentleman asked about the respective professionals who would be able to make decisions. Amendment No. 4A requires the second signatory to the renewal report to have been"““professionally concerned with the patient’s medical treatment””," so that person will actually know about the patient’s condition—a point I made earlier. To give some further detail, the second signatory has to state"““in writing that he agrees that the conditions””" for renewal are met. They will not be able to do that unless they have examined the patient recently and are confident that they know the patient’s current condition. We regard that as good professional practice. We shall make it clear in the code of practice that such a person should be suitably competent professionally to make the decision.