Mental Health Bill [Lords]

I will not. Under the original terms of the Bill, clinicians would be turned into jailers. Indeed, the measure has become a Home Office Bill, so it is rather interesting that a former Home Secretary has made a speech and a former Home Office Minister wishes to intervene. We have a focus on locking people up on the false premise of a threat to public safety, rather than a health Bill that is dedicated to giving support and treatment to people who happen to have a mental illness. The Government have also behaved with contempt towards parliamentary scrutiny with regard to the research that they commissioned in January 2006 involving the Institute of Psychiatry, which was part of a research package costing £236,000. Despite freedom of information requests, they did not publish the research until the day after the House of Lords had finished its deliberations on the subject. The Government still seem to be in denial. Despite the fact that the report said that there was no empirical evidence from 72 studies in six different countries throughout the world to support the efficacy of community treatment orders, the Minister wrote in a letter to me last week that she would like to take the opportunity briefly to draw my attention to the positive evidence for CTOs that exists. She wrote that we only have to look at what clinicians, patients and families around the world say about their own experiences. The Government are in denial. Where is the evidence? They have failed to produce it, so I hope that we will see more of it. Let me give the Minister a challenge. The House has had no opportunity to scrutinise her community treatment order research. Next Monday, in the Thatcher Room in Portcullis House, all members of the Public Bill Committee and previous members of the pre-legislative scrutiny Committee will be inviting witnesses to give evidence. We would be delighted if she were the first witness and if she would give us her case for community treatment orders. We will invite expert witnesses to comment on the six groups of amendments that the Lords made to the Bill. I hope that she will listen to the evidence that will be given by experts to a cross-party group of Members with an interest in the Bill next Monday, the day before the Committee stage starts. We need a Bill that commands the support of professionals and their patients and that achieves a proper balance among clinical discretion, patient safeguards and public protection, not a measure that contributes to stigma and undermines the therapeutic relationship between clinician and patient, thus driving mental illness underground. We need a Bill that uses compulsory powers as a last resort and that does not skew resources towards one group of patients at the expense of others. We are happy to support the Bill as it stands, although there are further amendments and improvements that we would like to make. It would be a great shame for Parliament and the mental health community if the Government were to use their majority in the House to bulldoze the Bill back to the status quo. After so much groundwork over seven years and so many learned contributions in the House of Lords, I hope that the Minister will go into Committee with an open mind.