Mental Health Bill [HL]

I am very grateful to noble Lords who have spoken in this debate. As I indicated earlier, I am especially interested because the work of the tribunal service now rests with me within the Department for Constitutional Affairs. One of the things that I have been doing is reviewing the role of non-legal members of tribunals, and I have had the good fortune to meet more than 100 members who we classify as non-legal members—I am looking for a better term than that. Included in that description are medical professionals of one kind or another and those who sit on the Mental Health Review Tribunal. I have the appropriate reactions of a Minister to statute—that it is very difficult to change it—so I do not want to accept this amendment, but I share the concerns of noble Lords. I looked at the minority ethnic breakdown of the statistics about those involved in mental health review tribunals, and the membership is 76 per cent white, 9 per cent Asian,2 per cent black, 13 per cent not stated and 0.004 per cent Chinese. We need to think very carefully about the flexibility and membership of the tribunal service. One of my ambitions is to reflect the breakdown and mix of our society better in the tribunal service in terms of ethnicity and, going back to Amendment No. 49, the mix of those who use and understand the service. There is nothing between the Department of Health and my department on this issue—my noble friend Lord Hunt of Kings Heath is nodding. We want to achieve that mix. I do not want to put that in statute, but we will do the best we can. Having chaired a health authority, I have a lot of experience of the issues and needs of child and adolescent mental health services and of trying to develop a good service right across the country to support children with these problems. Noble Lords will no doubt have talked far longer than I can about their questions and concerns. It is difficult to commit in statute that one could immediately get to the point of being able to put somebody with that expertise on the panel in the tribunal service on all occasions. I cannot do that. What I am prepared to commit to is that no child should appear before a tribunal unless he has been seen or supported in some way by someone with the expertise to reflect the fact that he is a young person, an adolescent, under 18 or so on. That might be done in the process of getting to the tribunal by having the opportunity to meet somebody from the service, it might be done by somebody on the panel or there might be other opportunities. My ambition is to get to the point where it is set in stone that that facility is available. I do not have enough people to be able to offer that now, but I will offer to make sure that from now on children who have not had the opportunity of that expertise do not appear before the tribunal. Noble Lords will appreciate that that is a huge commitment. I ask the noble Earl to withdraw the amendment because I cannot put that commitment in statute. I also ask him to recognise that I share the ambitions in both the amendments in this group. I see that the noble Lord, Lord Newton of Braintree, who is president of the Council on Tribunals, is in the Chamber. He is the key person working with me on this, and we are committed to achieving it. I am sure that we can because behind the amendments are serious and important issues that we need to address.