Baroness Neuberger (CB)

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 59, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Brixton, to which I have added my name. I must declare rather a lot of interests. I am chair of the University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and of the Whittington Health NHS Trust, which provides child and adolescent mental health services. I was also one of the vice-chairs of the independent review of the Mental Health Act in 2018, which feels like a long time ago. I am keeping my comments in Committee fairly short and sparse, because I feel that I have had quite a lot of say already, having been involved in that review. However, I want to speak about the issue of financial difficulties and mental health problems, because we should have looked at it in greater detail when we were conducting the review. It was an omission on our part, as we did not focus on it in any detail. The noble Baroness, Lady Barker, cited one of the people who spoke incredibly movingly to our review and who talked about how awful it is to be an in-patient. She said that she recovered and was given the care she needed, but she asked why it had to be such an awful experience. One of the things that is becoming clearer—the noble Lord, Lord Davies, alluded to it—is that when you have had a mental health crisis and your finances are in an absolute mess, because you did not get it together to do anything about them, why does your recovery have to be so awful because nobody helped you and gave you the advice you needed at the time? That is why this is so serious. If you are in hospital, you may not even get access to your computer, you may not be using your mobile phone all the time, you may be in something of a mess and your cognition may be severely affected. If that is the case, you will not be paying your bills, claiming your benefits or paying your rent. When you recover, it will take you ages to get into a situation where you can live a normal life again and not be hugely in debt. I was going to cite some of the experts by experience—the quotations have been given to me by the amazing Money and Mental Health Policy Institute, to which I am extremely grateful. However, since I do not want to take much more of your Lordships’ time, I shall just say that, although NICE stipulates that assessments in care and crisis plans at present should consider patients’ holistic social and living circumstances, which would include things such as housing and finance, mostly, in normal circumstances, the issues are too great. Often, the mental health needs are at crisis point and it just does not happen, and the same will happen with care and treatment plans unless we put this in the Bill. I ask the Minister—I have already heard what the noble Lord, Lord Davies, has said—whether she will think quite hard as to whether this could be in the Bill, along with parental involvement. I agree with all the amendments in this group. There are some things that need to be in the Bill that would make sure that, when we see treatment in place—and I see a lot of it in what I do in the other part of my life—those things are taken into account. If it is in secondary legislation, it is much harder and much less likely.