Mental health bill axing receives warm welcome
Thursday, 23 Mar 2006 17:28
Mental health bill axing receives warm welcome
Mental health charities have welcomed the news that the controversial mental health bill is to be dropped.
The government announced today that the bill, which has been in development for eight years at a cost of millions of pounds, is to be axed and an amendment to current legislation is being proposed instead.
Under the abandoned plans, first put forward in 1998, the scope for locking up people with mental disorders in the interests of public safety was to be extended.
But concerns about abuses of human rights have stifled its progress and the government today admitted it would not attempt to push the bill through parliament.
The new "streamlined" amending bill will be shorter than the controversial 2004 draft bill and will introduce supervised treatment in the community "to ensure that patients who have been discharged from compulsory treatment in hospital continue to comply with treatment", the Department of Health said today.
It will also use a "new simplified definition of mental disorder" in the act and remove the "treatability" clause, which states that people with a mental health disorder which is seen as untreatable are not taken into care.
Supervised community treatment will be used for "suitable patients" following an initial period of detention and treatment in hospital, which health minister Rosie Winterton said was a "vital part of getting help to people who need it".
"This new approach will fulfil our commitment to delivering modern mental health services via a streamlined bill which will be simpler to understand and less costly to implement than previous proposals," she added.
Speaking ahead of the announcement, the policy director of mental health charity Mind, Sophie Corlett, said there were "many problems" with the original bill.
"It does sweep up huge additional numbers of people under compulsory detention, people who have no right to be compulsorily detained at all," she told the Today programme.
"The previous legislation had exemptions for particular groups of people, for example people with learning difficulties, who are no longer exempt under the previous draft. And so it was a complete nonsense."
The Liberal Democrats welcomed the fact that "draconian plans to lock up people with mental health problems" have been dropped but expressed concern about what they called a "lost opportunity" to reform mental health provision.
"Scrapping the entire bill means we have also lost the opportunity to do something positive to tackle the mental health crisis in Britain," Lib Dem health spokesman Steve Webb said.
Changes to the 1983 Mental Health Act were first discussed following the murder of Lin Russell and her six-year-old daughter Megan in Kent in 1996 by Michael Stone, who had a personality disorder considered untreatable and was therefore able to remain in the community.
