UN asks serious questions of ministers after activists highlight ‘discriminatory’ mental health bill

A UN committee has raised serious concerns that the UK government’s mental health bill is breaching the international disability rights convention, with the legislation set to complete its passage through parliament when MPs return from their summer holidays.

The bill – based on draft legislation drawn up by the last Conservative government – has passed almost unnoticed through the Lords and the Commons, despite significant concerns raised by disabled campaigners.

They believe it falls far short of the fundamental reforms needed to ensure full human rights for disabled people, and that it will not stop them being subjected to forcible detention and degrading treatment.

There have also been protests by autistic people and people with learning difficulties, who believe the bill will not do enough to keep them out of mental health hospitals, or protect them from badly-run hospital services that have led to cruelty, abuse, and even deaths.

Now the UN’s committee on the rights of persons with disabilities has written to the UK government – through the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights – to express its concerns that the bill will breach the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) if it becomes law in its present form.

It said it had “received credible information” that indicated such concerns.

The committee fears the bill will continue to allow disabled people to be detained in hospital on the basis of their mental health impairment, and the provision of mental health services that are not based on “free and informed consent”.

It also questions whether disabled people and disabled people’s organisations have been “closely consulted and actively involved” in drafting the bill.

It points out that it called as far back as August 2017 for the UK to change laws that allow “non-consensual involuntary, compulsory treatment and detention” of disabled people based on their “actual or perceived impairment”, while making a similar call last year.

The action by the committee follows concerns raised by the user-led, rights-based organisation Liberation, which is run by people with mental health diagnoses.

Dorothy Gould, Liberation’s founder, said she had contacted the committee because she felt no-one within the UK parliament appeared willing to take notice of the concerns about the bill that have been raised by disabled people with lived experience of the areas it covers, while the government had been “utterly unwilling to listen”.

She said Liberation’s repeated calls for “full human rights” for people experiencing acute mental distress or trauma, and autistic people and those with learning difficulties, had been ignored, dismissed and misrepresented.

In contrast with “promising examples of genuine progress” in other countries, such as Mexico, the UK government “appears stuck in the past”, she said.

Gould said the bill “rests on the outdated assumption that some people with mental health diagnoses will always need to be detained against their will in psychiatric hospitals and treated under compulsion to protect them, mental health professionals and the public in general against serious risk”.

She pointed to a World Health Organisation and UN publication (see pages 15-16, box two) that concluded there was inadequate research evidence that these forms of coercion prevent risk, while they were actively discriminatory, and had resulted in serious harm, while there were also alternative and better ways of handling any risks.

She said: “Given this, the government’s argument that it can only give people with mental health diagnoses ‘more’ rights, not the full human rights held by members of the public in general, falls on very weak ground.

“It would be difficult, in fact, to describe the government’s approach as more than the continuing discrimination against people with mental health diagnoses that has dominated UK politics generation-in, generation-out.

“This discrimination must end once and for all.

“What we need instead is legislation which breaks away decisively from the current, health-dominated model, recognises us as whole people and ensures that we can live independently in the community in the same way as anyone else.”

Liberation will now be submitting further evidence before the UN committee challenges the UK government over the bill in Geneva next month.

Simone Aspis, Free Our People Now (FOPN) campaign manager for Inclusion London, welcomed the committee’s investigation.

She said FOPN was “very disappointed” that the government had introduced a bill that fails to implement the committee’s recommendations to end compulsory treatment within hospital settings, stop forced medical treatment, and set out plans to reduce and end institutionalisation.

Aspis said: “This bill starts from the wrong place, locking autistic people and people with learning difficulties up in inhumane institutions which deprives us of our liberty.”

FOPN will be submitting its own evidence to the UN committee, in which it will explain how the bill itself and the government, parliament, and the Department of Health and Social Care “have all violated our human rights”.

She said the knowledge that it was a Labour government that first ratified UNCRPD in 2009 “makes it worse”, with its actions showing it now had “total contempt” for implementation of the treaty.

The UN committee is seeking answers from the UK government by 11 August, and will then examine its concerns during its next session in Geneva, from 11 to 29 August.

It is already set to investigate concerns that the Labour government’s universal credit bill is a fresh attack on disabled people’s rights.

The Department of Health and Social Care said yesterday (Wednesday) that it would respond to the committee in due course and was confident the bill was compatible with UNCRPD.

The mental health bill will reform the Mental Health Act 1983, and it includes measures to end the use of police and prison cells as “places of safety” for people in mental health crisis; stop the “inappropriate” detention of autistic people and people with learning difficulties; and introduce statutory care and treatment plans.

The bill also gives patients more say over how they should be treated if they are sectioned under the act, and offers “stronger protections” for patients, staff and the public, the government says.

It also offers patients the right to choose a person to represent their interests and “greater access to advocacy” when they are detained, and it reforms the use of community treatment orders so they are only used “when appropriate and proportionate”.

A note from the editor:

Please consider making a voluntary financial contribution to support the work of DNS and allow it to continue producing independent, carefully-researched news stories that focus on the lives and rights of disabled people and their user-led organisations.

Please do not contribute if you cannot afford to do so, and please note that DNS is not a charity. It is run and owned by disabled journalist John Pring and has been from its launch in April 2009.

Thank you for anything you can do to support the work of DNS…