Yes. People will also attribute bad intention to the person when what is happening is that the short-term memory is simply not functioning properly. For instance, someone with very little short-term memory may find it difficult to turn up on time, as I mentioned earlier. That may be not because they are being lazy, truculent or difficult but simply because their brain does not work in that way. It may mean that their capacity is so diminished that, according to the Bill, they cannot make decisions. Alternatively, it might just be one of the elements that needs to be dealt with—they need to find tricks to circumvent the problem, and medical and clinical professionals can help.
This is why I tabled my amendments. Neurorehabilitation, when done well and on a sustained basis, can take an individual from being low functioning and high dependency, perhaps needing three or four people just to be able to wash themselves, clothe themselves and provide for themselves physically, to a much higher level of personal functionality and much greater independence. I have made that argument from a different place, in the sense that taking someone from needing four people to look after them to just one person coming in once a day for an hour or so could be an enormous financial saving to the taxpayer. That is why neurorehabilitation and the work that has been done in many cases can be so important.
Neurorehabilitation is really important in relation to the Bill. We might be able to take somebody from a place where they are not truly able to make a decision about what treatment they should be undergoing and, according the Bill, deprive them of their liberty, to a place where that would no longer be appropriate. My anxiety is that if there is no incentive in the system to ensure that neurorehabilitation is provided to people,
there is a danger that we just discard them and leave to the side, particularly as we are now talking about a three-year term rather than a one-year term. I think the clauses at the end of the Bill militate in favour of renewal, rather than providing a clear option not to renew at that point.
I have an anxiety that perhaps in some care homes and other places there just might be an incentive to think, “Well, this person isn’t going to get better so we’re not going to do anything to try to help them to get better.” I do not want to give up on so many people. Thanks to what the Government have done with the major trauma centres, we now save about 800 or 1,000 more lives every year following road traffic accidents and the like, but we need to give people quality of life. We do not have enough people working in this field. We need to recruit many more people. If 20 people were inspired by what we are talking about today to go and work in that field—there are so many high rewards for people working to take people from high dependency to low dependency—that would be a success in itself.