Sector welcomes “long overdue” mental health law reforms

Charities have welcomed the Government’s intention to deliver reforms to the Mental Health Act, while warning that the “ambitious” measures will require funding and resources to be fully realised.

The Mental Health Bill, announced in the King’s Speech last week (17 July), will amend the Mental Health Act 1983 to give people detained “greater choice and autonomy, enhanced rights and support”.

Its main elements are:

• ensuring that detention and treatment under the Mental Health Act takes place only when necessary, by revising the detention criteria to ensure that people can only be detained if they pose a risk of serious harm either to themselves or to others
• further limiting the extent to which people with a learning disability and/or autistic people can be detained and treated
• strengthening the voice of patients by adding statutory weight to patients’ rights to be involved with planning for their care
• removing police stations and prisons as places of safety under the Mental Health Act.

Responding to the planned reforms, Sarah Woolnough, Chief Executive at The King’s Fund, said: “We welcome the priority given to delivering long overdue reforms to the Mental Health Act. A society can be judged by how it treats its most vulnerable, and these carefully considered reforms will mean people who find themselves detained under the Act can have greater confidence that the restrictions they face are proportionate and applied with dignity and respect.”

Describing the reforming of the Mental Health Act as a “once-in-a-generation” opportunity, Dr Sarah Hughes, Chief Executive of Mental Health Charity Mind, said: “With the number of people being detained under the Act at a five-year high, bringing the law into the twenty-first century is a welcome first step in tackling the nation’s mental health crisis. The previous government made a number of positive proposals for reforming the Act, but there is still a way to go.”

She continued: “This bill is a chance to strengthen people’s rights, choice, and control when they’re being treated in a mental health hospital. It’s a chance that must be taken to address the shameful racial disparities the law currently enables, particularly for Black people who are nearly four times more likely to be detained. And it’s a chance to ditch Community Treatment Orders, which are meant to give people supervised treatment in the community but are too often intrusive, restrictive and fail to reduce readmissions as they were intended. 

“These ambitious reforms will need funding and resources to be delivered and fully realised. We stand ready to work with the new UK government to make sure we seize this opportunity and create the wholesale reform of the mental health system we need now more than ever.”   

Lottie Winson