Mental Health Bill [HL]

My Lords, I am extremely grateful for the intervention of the noble Lord, Lord Soley, because he appears to have made a case for the amendment. People with serious personality disorders can be treated and should have access to treatment and the wide range of facilities available to them. The whole point of the amendment is that everybody detained in hospital should have appropriate treatment made available to them, treating their symptoms and signs of disorder. That is, after all, the therapeutic object of admitting all patients to all hospitals. We cannot succeed in instantly curing everybody—we all know that; it is the same in every branch of medicine—but we can certainly have a go. That is the therapeutic intention, and there is a determination that we should not move away from it. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Soley, that we do not want balance on this point. Having read through the Government’s amendment, I was initially cheered because I thought most issues had been addressed. In fact, the more you look at the wording, the more you realise that it was a rather mean-spirited response to the problem that we were trying to address. We must have absolute clarity on this, which is why we must support the amendment.