Mental Health Bill [HL]

My Lords, does the Minister accept that a consultant psychiatrist has had 13 years of training to create the tools for him to make these very difficult judgments? When he mentions other professionals and training, I think that we are probably assuming that he means perhaps days or weeks of training. Does he really think that, in the case of someone suffering from a psychotic illness, anyone other than a psychiatrist, who has had the many, many years of training and experience that I mentioned, can develop the expertise to make these judgments to impose on the individual, possibly for very long periods, a requirement to take medications that that clinician will not understand and the side effects of which that clinician will not understand? Does it not seem incongruous to the Minister to have people taking decisions that they simply do not have the competence to take?