Mental Capacity (Amendment) Bill [Lords] — House of Commons, 2018-12-18
Topic: Health
Barbara Mary Keeley (Labour, Centre-left): Very much so. I will come on to that shortly, but I will not leave the point about independent hospitals, because it is important We know only too well from media reports, and the Secretary of State does too, of the torrid situation in independent hospitals that detain people with autism and learning disabilities under the Mental Health Act, and the measures in this Bill could have disastrous and far-reaching consequences. I have raised at the Dispatch Box on several occasions the appalling treatment of people with autism and learning disabilities in assessment and treatment units. I have described the situation as amounting to a national scandal, and I believe that it is still so. As many as 20% of people in these units have been there for more than 10 years. The average stay is five and a half years. The average cost of a placement in an assessment and treatment unit for people with a learning disability is £3,500 a week, but the costs can be as high as £13,000 a week or more As the journalist Ian Birrell has exposed in The Mail on Sunday, private sector companies are making enormous profits from admitting people to those units and keeping them there for long periods. Two giant US healthcare companies, a global private equity group, a Guernsey-based hedge fund, two British firms and a major charity are among the beneficiaries of what campaigners have seen as patients being seen as cash cows to be milked by a flawed system at the expense of taxpayers. According to a written answer I obtained from the Department of Health and Social Care, in the past year alone the NHS has paid out over £100 million to private companies for these placements. Shamefully, the Government cannot reveal how much they have spent since they came to power, because they claim that they did not record the expenditure before 2017. It cannot be right that the Bill potentially gives private companies the power to lock up vulnerable people for years at a time to feed a lucrative and expanding private health sector I would like to draw attention to one more issue that the Bill does not address—we have already discussed it—and that cannot be papered over by amendments. The Government commissioned Professor Sir Simon Wessely to lead a review of the Mental Health Act, which is of course long overdue for reform. However, as the hon. Member for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich (Dr Poulter) said, there is clearly a complex interface between the Mental Capacity Act and the Mental Health Act. Professor Sir Simon Wessely has made the point that there is now a worrying trend of people, particularly with dementia, being detained under the Mental Health Act when their deprivation of liberty should be dealt with under the Mental Capacity Act. His review recommended imposing a new line of objection to determine who should be treated under which legislation, but, as the hon. Gentleman said, there has been no engagement with these recommendations, which were finalised as this Bill was going through the House of Lords In our view, the Government must commit to a review of the interface between the two Acts, with full consultation, which has, to date, been sorely lacking. It is one thing to say that Sir Simon had a conversation with the Secretary of State about this, but that is not full consultation. The consultation must look at both hospital and community settings and provide clear and accessible rights of appeal.