Mental Health Bill [Lords]

My hon. Friend makes an interesting point, particularly about Scotland, where the scope of supervised community treatment goes far wider than what we are proposing in the Bill. In Scotland, of course, supervised community treatment is available in relation to any patient—not just those who have been compulsorily detained in hospital. I want to stress a point that has often been ignored: under the Bill, supervised community treatment will not be available to a patient who is already being treated in the community or who is a voluntary in-patient. As hon. Members will be aware, our original proposal was indeed to make supervised community treatment available in all such circumstances, precisely as the Scottish legislation has done, but we considered very carefully the objections of the joint scrutiny Committee and others to that aspect of the 2004 draft Bill and we decided not to proceed in that way. We have sought to reach agreement with those in the other place on a number of issues, but we are not prepared to accept those Lords amendments that would restrict the use of community treatment orders to patients who have been detained as compulsory patients at least twice. I believe that that would be a wholly unacceptable restriction on clinicians: it would exclude patients whose first compulsory admission had already been preceded by several voluntary admissions; and it would deny the potential benefits of supervised community treatment to patients until there had been a further crisis and a further compulsory hospitalisation. I simply do not believe that that can be justified, and we will therefore seek to reverse that amendment in Committee. Under supervised community treatment, clinicians will keep a very close eye on people and, if they are in danger of relapsing, take appropriate action to prevent that. Of course, one part of supervised community treatment provision will be appropriate conditions, which might, for instance, state that somebody live in a particular place or abstain from the use of recreational drugs, from alcohol abuse and so on. When one thinks of the situations that can exacerbate or, indeed, help serious mental disorder, one sees that such conditions are simply common sense.