Baroness Lawlor (Con)

My Lords, I will speak in support of Amendment 111 in the name of my noble friend Lady Eaton. This would require a higher bar for proving capacity in care homes and nursing homes. The noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan, has already referred to the data: the evidence of higher cognitive impairment in 70% of care homes, the failure of MCA assessments in 15% to 25% of them, and the incidence of dementia. I will not recount the other data; I have cut it out of my speech. There is also the very mixed picture we get of care homes and nursing homes. One example was a recent—well, not that recent—undercover BBC programme about Whorlton Hall in County Durham, a hospital for patients with learning disabilities and autism. The evidence was shocking. It was described by specialists in the subject as amounting to psychological torture. Apart from the problems that we have in care homes with giving patients the ability to use capacity because of all the counterfactuals that exist and the impossibility of accurately establishing capacity, I reflect on the potential harm resulting from another factor, a danger we should bear in mind—that from the state. Officials bureaucratise a system in a way that endangers the frail and the elderly and, under this Bill, particularly endangers care home residents, some of whom have been misdiagnosed as having capacity when they do not, and go on a path to suicide. We have already heard mention of the Liverpool care pathway in that connection.