Mental Health Bill – the Joint Committee on Human Rights speaks
Today, 19 May 2025, the UK Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights published its report on the Mental Health Bill. Our Ulele Burnham gave oral evidence to the committee and Oliver Lewis provided evidence in written submissions. Their evidence draws from their experience as barristers practising in the Court of Protection and in mental health law.
The Committee’s report draws on the evidence of Ulele and Oliver in respect of the Bill’s proposals for those with learning disabilities and autism, deprivations of liberty in the community in specific circumstances, and the absence of provision to address racial disparities in the application of the current legislative scheme.
The Committee noted that people with learning disabilities and/or autism still experience long periods of MHA detention despite the widespread agreement that psychiatric hospitals are inappropriate places for them.
The Committee cited Oliver’s evidence that, “Mental health hospitals are noisy, dangerous, antitherapeutic and boring places. It is rarely possible to meet the needs of a person with a learning disability in these settings. It is often impossible to meet an autistic person’s sensory needs in a hospital. Autistic meltdowns are commonly met with seclusion, restraint and sedative medication: these restrictive practices cause trauma, [and] more behaviours that challenge which are again met with restrictive practices and the cycle continues.”
If learning disability and autism were removed from the purview of detention and treatment under s.3 of the Act (this is the provision that permits long-term detention and compulsory treatment), Oliver told the Committee it is likely that the same people would continue to be detained inappropriately, first and most obviously by using the Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards pursuant to Schedule A1 to the Mental Capacity Act 2005. Second, the risk of prosecution and detention pursuant to a hospital order under s.37 MHA (potentially with a s.41 MHA restriction order) increases. The person would then be seen as forensic patient and spend far longer in hospital than they otherwise would have done under s.3 MHA. Third, if a hospital is not permitted to detain a person in a crisis under s.3 MHA, there is the option of using other mental health diagnosis as the reason to detain them under s.3 MHA. Ulele, in her oral evidence, identified the clear risk that people with learning disabilities and autism might be “shunted into the criminal justice system”.
The Committee examined the reasons why so many autistic people and people with learning disabilities ending up in detention are because of a “…lack of provision in the community for those with learning disabilities and/or autism. This will not be affected simply by excluding those people from detention for treatment under section 3 of the MHA. Dr [Lucy] Series told us that “people do not end up at this point when services in the community are serving them. They end up at this point because either their social care is non–existent or has broken down, or because they are not able to access appropriate mental health or autism services at the point of need.” Dr Oliver Lewis put it even more starkly:
[T]he MHA is not the reason that people with learning disabilities and/or autism are in psychiatric hospitals. The reason they are there is that there has been a failure of housing and/or care in the community at the local level.”
The Committee recommended that the government should report data to Parliament within a year of the relevant clauses of the Bill coming into force, and stick to their commitment to take action if they indicate that the Mental Capacity Act is being used inappropriately.
The Committee’s support for the provisions in the Bill which would make deprivations of liberty lawful in discrete circumstances specifically relied upon Ulele’s suggestion that they could reduce unnecessary hospital detention and replace it with less restrictive, but effective, risk management in the community.
In recommending that the Bill include “equity” amongst its Statements of Principles, the Committee cited the following views expressed by Ulele:
“Given that this procedure for reform of the Mental Health Act was driven by concerns about the disproportionate application of the interventions under the Mental Health Act and their effect on persons in black and ethnic–minority communities, it is disappointing that the Bill does not contain anything which would do something about that.”
To contact Ulele or Oliver please email their practice manager Emily Norman.