Mental Health Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 52: 52: Before Clause 35 , insert the following new Clause— ““Obstruction After section 129(2) of the 1983 Act insert— ““(2A) Any person who offers any inducement or makes any threat with a view to improperly influencing any decision required to be made by a person under this Act shall be guilty of an offence.”””” The noble Earl said: The purpose of this amendment is to extend the scope of the offence of obstruction of persons performing functions under the Act to include inducements or threats, if made with the intention of improperly influencing a decision. The rationale for this broadening of the offence is that it would strengthen the position of approved mental health professionals in resisting pressures from managers or more senior colleagues to act in a particular way. The pressure would have to be improper. In other words, it would not preclude the strong expression of legitimate professional opinions, but would include any threat to the AMHP’s job security or promotion prospects. This is part of a wider issue about the independence of AMHPs. There is a widely held view that recruitment of NHS-employed health professionals as AMHPs will further exacerbate the erosion of independence that AMHPs should have from the hospital and the doctors, a process that is already occurring as a result of the secondment or transfer of approved social workers to mental health trusts. The ASWs are, technically, still employed by the local authority while acting in their statutory role, but in many cases their managers have also been seconded or transferred to the trust, so the independent role of local government in the compulsory admission process, which has been a basic element of that process since 1959, is becoming largely a fiction. As a result, the process no longer meets the current human rights standard for the making of decisions involving loss of liberty, in that the two most powerful decision-makers, the ASW and the consultant psychiatrist, may well be close colleagues in the same team, both of them responsible for the trust that runs the hospital to which the patient would be admitted. The Government acknowledged that at the beginning of the review of the legislation in 1998, and their solution was to require all initial decisions to be confirmed by an early tribunal hearing. Now that this proposal has been abandoned, it is essential that corrective action is taken to ensure that the process meets accepted standards for impartiality and objectivity. As part of that, the legal position of AMHPs needs to be strengthened to protect them from improper influence from trust managers or more senior trust colleagues. The Government have dismissed that concern, but, having spoken to members of the Mental Health Alliance, I have no doubt whatever that it is a real issue. The amendment would ensure that AMHPs are, and are seen to be, independent of the doctors and the hospital, that their decisions cannot be overruled by the local authority and that they are able to exercise their professional judgment, free of improper influence. I beg to move.