Reforming the Mental Health Act: A Successor to the Mental Health Act Commission

In 1998, the Department of Health announced that there would be a ‘root and branch review’ of the Mental Health Act. It established the Mental Health Legislation Review Team (the Richardson Committee) to “advise on how the mental health legislation should be shaped to reflect contemporary patterns of care within a framework which balances the need to protect the rights of individual patients and the need to ensure public safety” (DoH, 1999 ¹ ). The proposition that the Mental Health Act Commission (MHAC) or equivalent specialist body would have a key role within the new legislative framework was rarely questioned during the early stages of the review. There was a consensus that being made subject to compulsory intervention, for reasons of mental disorder, requires additional safeguards and oversight from a body constituted for the purpose. Paul Boateng, then Minister of State for Health, in his opening remarks to the Richardson Committee specifically asked it to consider how the current MHAC functions might be revised so that any successor body “can address the whole issue of service quality whether for detained or informal patients.”