Mental Health Bill [HL]

My Lords, I cannot better the case put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Williamson, in favour of this amendment, but I should like to express my firm support for it and to add some emphasis to a number of the points that he has so ably made. I begin by saying how much I endorse his arguments in favour of an age-appropriate setting for children and young people under the age of 18. This seems a classic example of a win-win amendment. We are all aware of real horror stories involving children who are sent to adult wards for treatment, and who are then molested and traumatised by adult patients. The experiences endured by young people in such circumstances are often terrible. However, it is not only those horror stories that this amendment is about. It is about that central, key issue which has surfaced and resurfaced throughout our debates on this Bill; namely, that fear of the mental health care system engendered by traumatic experiences of whatever nature carries with it the potential for wholesale disengagement from mental health services in the future. The moment we see that happening—it happens often—there is only one consequence. The child or young person will not wish to seek help from anyone—they are turned off. They will hide their symptoms and carry on in a state of acute mental distress until they have reached crisis point. The irony is that having reached that crisis point, they are more likely to be treated under compulsion—so the trauma repeats itself. The acuity of need among some young people carried over into adulthood is a cause for grave concern. Recent research has shown that almost 78 per cent of adult service users receiving intensive services had received a diagnosis before the age of 18; 60 per cent had received such a diagnosis before the age of 15. Those figures underline the importance of making sure that children and young people with mental health problems receive the services that are appropriate to their needs and which make them want to trust and use those services in the future if they need to. The Minister may well fall back on the standard response by saying that this is an amendment about service provision, but I hope he will see that it is not just about that. It is about doing the thing that Ministers have repeatedly said that they want this Bill to do; namely, to make sure that people get the care they need when compulsion has to be used. The Minister said in Committee that it was difficult to specify services to a particular group. I must say that I did not really follow that argument; when I think of all the Bills that we have debated in this House over the past few years relating to children and services to children, I wonder where that argument came from. Nobody doubts the Government’s sincerity in wanting to see better mental health services for children and young people. We hear the right things being said, both in the code of practice and the children’s NSF, but we know from the royal college, the Children’s Commissioner and the noble Lord, Lord Patel, in Committee that neither policy guidance nor the code has delivered the desired results. Good practice is, regrettably, not the norm. Research published in the BMJ shows that more than one-third of all young people admitted to hospital for a mental illness are admitted to a general psychiatric or paediatric ward. Something more needs to be done. We know that the implementation of standard 9 in the NSF is receiving what the Minister, Ivan Lewis, called unprecedented priority, and that resources are being put into that whole area with the aim of solving the problem over the next two years. That is what Mr Lewis has said—and, if it is so, there really should be no argument about giving statutory backing to the notion of an age-appropriate setting. For once, we are not faced by funding constraints, because the funding has already been allocated, so I hope that the Minister will be receptive and sympathetic to everything that the noble Lord, Lord Williamson, argued for.