Mental Health Bill [Lords]

Richard Quigley Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 14th October 2025 Commons Chamber

[Dr Evans]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right that that support needs to be there. Fortunately, it is not the budget that is reducing but the proportion of funding, and it shows the priorities of this Government when it comes to mental health.

I am concerned that without new clause 29, a child may be harmed or traumatised and placed in an adult ward without proper justification—and it will be little comfort for the family to hear that guidance was breached.

Amendment 41 stands up for the simple but vital principle that when a child is detained under the Mental Health Act, the person legally recognised to act for them—their nominated person—should hold parental responsibility. Only where there are legitimate safeguarding concerns should that be set aside. At first glance, this may seem technical, but it speaks to something profound about how the law views childhood, family and the balance between protection and autonomy.

The Government are right to use the Bill to modernise the old “nearest relative” system, which was too rigid, too bound by bloodline and at times blind to the complexities of family life. Under the Bill, however, a child under 16 deemed competent could nominate any adult—that could be a 19-year-old boyfriend or peer or someone exercising control—and once nominated, that person gets full control. It is a legal authority. We need to ensure that protection is there for the person if there is a breakdown on the family side. [Interruption.] I see that Madam Deputy Speaker is encouraging me to wind up, so I will solidify my comments into a more erudite approach.

The point is that in law this principle is already clear in the Children Act 1989, which defined it as the foundation stone of what families should look like. With this amendment, I believe we have solved the concerns the Minister had at Committee stage about the state of a family in the modern era. In any other walk of life the legal framework exists, so why would we weaken it when it comes to mental health?

We discussed the issues with A&E and the grey area there in Committee, and I was grateful to the Minister for meeting beforehand to discuss them. I know that he took on my comments about solving the practicalities, and I hope he will look at them seriously.

For this House, there is no greater moral burden than deciding for someone who cannot decide for themselves—where care ends and where control begins. That is exactly what the House is addressing with this Bill: how to protect without diminishing, how to act with compassion without surrendering precision, and how to empower without imposing. Involuntary care must never be the reflex of a system, be it under pressure or out of principle. The House agrees on this position; the challenge is delivery. Compassion demands more than good intentions. It demands delivery, discipline and detail. With this Bill, the Opposition lays the challenge of delivery. It must be not just a pledge but a plan. The public will judge us all not just on how kindly this House speaks, but on how faithfully it serves those who depend on us most.

[Mr Richard Quigley (Isle of Wight West) (Lab)]

I will speak to new clauses 28 and 36 and amendment 39, which I tabled not just as an MP but as a father. After what my family have been through, I believe that any parent would do the same.

Yesterday, alongside the right hon. Member for Salisbury (John Glen), I had the privilege of hearing Dr Kate Szymankiewicz speak about her daughter Ruth. She shared not only the tragic circumstances of Ruth’s death but the type of person Ruth was: her dream of becoming a vet, her kindness, and how friends described her as a character straight out of an Enid Blyton novel. That is the Ruth her family remember and cherish. As parents, we became part of a world we never wanted to know. I am privileged to have met Kate, but we agreed that we wished our paths had never crossed because of what that meant.

Ruth was admitted to an in-patient facility for treatment of an eating disorder, but instead of receiving the care she needed, her family were shut out and allowed only two two-hour visits per week. They spent more time travelling than they did with their daughter. Ruth was just 14 years old when she fatally self-harmed, just five months into her stay.

Three months from that date, my family were faced with the same hospital, Huntercombe, as the only choice of a bed for our daughter. At that same hospital, when a child asked if they could have an extra type of jam for breakfast in the morning, they were told it did not have the budget, and when asked why Minstrels were no longer part of snack time, they were told that they were eating too many. That is the problem with NHS-funded private provision: even at £900 a night, the operators plead poverty.

My wife and I have two vivid memories of our youngest being prised from us without any warning. We thought that was normal. Six months of nasogastric tube feeding—we thought that was normal. Illegal restraint so bad that it caused post-traumatic stress disorder—we thought that was normal. Forgetting to feed our daughter 11 times—we started to realise that that was normal, but not acceptable. Instead of wishing to improve its practice, the hospital has accused me of making this up.

If a child is facing any other physical illness such as cancer, or even something more short-term that requires a hospital stay, parental visits and involvement are quite rightly seen as a means of enhancing care. I genuinely struggle to understand why our clinical consensus around mental health continues to support a model where already vulnerable children are isolated from their parents—the very people who know and love them most. Children on these wards are treated as wilful—they are not; they are children—and without empathy or sympathy. Many consultants we encountered opted not to apply the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence guidelines. Staff were poorly trained and in fear of psychiatrists, who ruled the roost and prevented people from speaking up. The private equity firms are focused not on long-term treatment but just on turning mental health into money.

My amendments do not seek to undermine the Bill’s strengths, nor the important work undertaken by the Department. In fact, the cross-party support I have received, including from the right hon. Member for Salisbury, reflects how uncontroversial they are.

The Minister and I have had robust and constructive discussions on the matter, but I ask him to confirm that he will do everything in his power to ensure the following. Parents must not be shut out of their child’s care, as evidence shows that regular parental contact enhances care outcomes. The placement of children on adult mental health wards under the Mental Health Act must be limited strictly to exceptional circumstances, and practitioners must be actively compelled where appropriate to involve themselves in the development and delivery of a child’s care and treatment plan.

We have a duty to ensure that the tragic circumstances surrounding Ruth’s death are never repeated. The Government were elected with a phenomenal majority, winning places we never thought possible—including my own constituency of Isle of Wight West—on a platform of meaningful change. If we do not use this moment to do the right thing and acknowledge that children in mental health services need their parents more often than not, I fear that we may never get another chance.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)]

I call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.