Mental Capacity (Amendment) Bill [HL]

Baroness Barran Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 16th July 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con) (Maiden Speech)]

It is a huge honour and privilege to address your Lordships’ House today. I would like to start by thanking your Lordships for the very warm welcome that I have received from everyone on all sides of the House. I am grateful to Black Rod and her team for their care and attention to detail, and particularly to the doorkeepers who have manoeuvred me to the right side of the Chamber with a tactful “Where are you planning to sit, my Lady?”, or gently explained that “Morning” and “Afternoon” take on a whole new meaning in your Lordships’ House.

My supporters, the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, and my noble friend Lady Williams of Trafford, were superb at putting me at my ease during my introduction, and my noble friend Lord Sherbourne has been masterly in answering my questions with the utmost patience and encouragement. And encouragement is the word that best sums up the past two weeks. All your Lordships have been consistently, and at times almost fiercely, encouraging, and I feel extraordinarily lucky to be here.

Prior to joining this House, I worked for over 20 years in the City, founding one of the first European hedge funds, before going on to advise philanthropists and foundations on their charitable giving, as well as joining the boards of Comic Relief, the Henry Smith Charity and, most recently, the Royal Foundation.

Fifteen years ago, my life changed course when I asked several small charities what they thought was the biggest human problem that was the hardest to raise money for. They all gave me the same answer: domestic violence and abuse. As a result, the charity SafeLives was born on my kitchen table in 2004, with a focus on keeping victims and children safe in their homes wherever possible and holding perpetrators of abuse to account while still helping them to change. As chief executive, I worked with voluntary and statutory agencies across the fields of criminal justice, substance use, mental health, social care, children’s charities and the family courts. I was guided by many victims and survivors of domestic abuse, and today I pay tribute to their extraordinary courage.

Throughout, I have been supported by some exceptional mentors and have had the chance to try to tackle some truly important problems. I think I am safe in expecting that both those things will continue in this House.

Very high up on the list of important problems that this Bill seeks to address is that of when and how to deprive someone who lacks mental capacity of their liberty while upholding their rights. In preparing this speech, I spoke to several organisations working in this field: L’Arche UK, Shared Lives Plus and Gentoo. As a non-lawyer, I focused on the practical aspects of how the Bill will work and asked them all, “What works least well with the current Act in relation to deprivation of liberty safeguards, or DoLS?” One person smiled and said, “Try and imagine doing this. We put an automatic reminder on our calendars every month to write to the local authority to authorise the DoLS. We rarely, if ever, hear back. If we don’t do it, we’re penalised by the CQC in our inspection”. They all highlighted practical problems with apparently pointless bureaucracy, a lack of consideration of the feelings of friends, families and carers, a disconnect between the views of social care and health professionals, and a lack of capacity to provide independent mental capacity advocates. They spoke of their frustration at an opportunity missed to protect vulnerable people, with an apparently uniform and blunt approach.

I believe that the Bill goes some significant way to addressing those concerns. There is a clear intention to simplify the bureaucracy involved and to listen to the views of families, friends and those who know and care for the individual, while providing more skilled resource to resolve the most complex cases. Welcome, too, are other practical aspects—the portability of the authorisations between settings and the extension of their duration from one to three years.

However, the key to success with this Bill when it becomes law will lie in the quality of its implementation. Does my noble friend the Minister agree that it is both helpful and necessary to give the responsible bodies and care providers absolute clarity, through the code of practice, about the Government’s expectations of them, particularly regarding those sections that aim to give agency and protection to those impacted by this legislation? I refer, in particular, to the training, qualifications and availability of IMCAs and approved mental capacity professionals as well as to the need to give timely responses when renewing authorisations and in the case of an appeal. This would give assurance to the family and carers of those lacking capacity that their rights and wishes will be upheld as well as their needs met.

The novelist and Nobel Prize winner Pearl Buck said:

“The test of a civilisation is in the way that it cares for its helpless members”.


I am sure that your Lordships will agree that this Bill and how it is implemented locally go to the very heart of that test.