Absolutely. People would expect that terror suspects would be placed on watch lists immediately —the minute they are placed on police bail—but it appears that that did not happen in this case.
The Prime Minister told the Liaison Committee in January that he would look carefully at stronger police bail powers, but the Bill does not deliver them and nor does it close the loophole. The basic problem is that police bail conditions are not enforceable. As such, the Bill misses a major opportunity, so we will press the Government hard in Committee to correct the situation. We need a tougher and targeted police bail regime that, when dealing with more serious offences, can impose enforceable sanctions, such as the confiscation of passports and travel documents in terrorism-related cases.
The proposed reforms on mental health are timely and much needed. Given the levels of stress and insecurity inherent in 21st-century living, mental health will be one of the greatest—if not the greatest—health challenges of this century, so it is essential that the police and the criminal justice system develop basic standards to deal with it. We therefore strongly welcome moves to ban the use of police cells for children in crisis and to introduce limits on their use for adults, and we also support limiting the time for which people can be held. Our concern is not with the measures themselves, but whether they can be delivered in practice.
As shadow Health Secretary, I revealed in the previous Parliament how the Government had not honoured their commitment to parity between physical and mental health, but instead cut mental health more deeply than other parts of the NHS. As a consequence, mental health services in many parts of the country are today in crisis. Only last week, Richard Barber, a councillor from Golborne in my constituency, contacted me to say that he had worked with professionals for two days to help to find a tier 4 bed for a highly vulnerable young man who was close to suicide. Shockingly, no beds were available anywhere in the country. As the Royal College of Psychiatrists has pointed out, banning the use of cells, as welcome as that is, does not solve the problem of why those cells are used in the first place. Similarly, reducing the time limit for assessment does not itself guarantee enough trained professionals to deliver the new standard.
The combination of the changes could put professionals in a difficult position. Assessments to detain under the Mental Health Act 1983 cannot be completed until a bed has been identified, so the Bill could put professionals in the invidious position of having to choose between breaking the law, by going over the 24-hour period if a bed cannot be identified, and not breaking the law but releasing someone who should be detained. It is therefore essential that, alongside the Bill, the Home Secretary and the Health Secretary issue new instructions to health service commissioners to open sufficient beds and train sufficient professionals to deliver these welcome new commitments.