Wes Streeting

I wholeheartedly agree with my hon. Friend. As he has heard many times from this Dispatch Box, we want to see a shift in the centre of gravity in the NHS out of hospitals and into the community as one of the three key shifts that will underpin our 10-year plan for health, which we will be publishing in the not-too-distant future. The Mental Health Act is designed to keep patients and the public safe, but it is clear to anyone who has seen how patients are treated that it does so in an outdated and blunt way that is unfit for the modern age. It is too easy for someone under the Act to lose all sense of agency, rights and respect. It is sometimes necessary to detain and treat patients, but there is no reason why patients experiencing serious mental illness should be denied the choice and agency they would rightly expect in physical care. Not only should the health service treat all its patients with dignity and respect anyway, but giving people a say over their own care means that their treatment is more likely to be successful. In the foreword to his independent review, Sir Simon Wessely said: “I often heard from those who told me, looking back, that they realise that compulsory treatment was necessary, even life-saving, but then went on to say ‘why did it need to be given in the way it was?’” Another patient in the 2018 review said: “I felt a lot of things were done to me rather than with me”. We need to get this right. We need to give these patients a voice.