You may remember me posting at the end of last year about a High Court judgment ordering a new inquest after the death of Sally Mays in Hull in 2014?  The written judgment is now available to read and I think it’s interesting, not just for two particular reasons —

• It taught me even more detail than I knew before about the particular circumstances leading to Sally attending the Miranda Unit in Hull and detail matters, in the end.
• It explains why a new inquest is both necessary and lawfully required, despite the fact there is no criticism about the Senior Coroner’s handling of the original inquest and because the new inquest will not substantially alter the previous finding that Sally’s care was “lamentable”.

The legal claim is around the existence of information which was deliberately withheld / not disclosed to the original inquest and which, despite it all still pushing in the direction of lamentable care, seems to raise the possibility that new facts could be found about further opportunities to intervene before...

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The Independent reporting today NHS mental health services are in a “desperate” situation, largely over access to beds when admission to hospital under the MHA is needed.

This post need only be short – my reaction to reading this, frankly, was to wonder what has changed?

I suspect it’s the frequency with which the situations may be occurring or perhaps the frequency of us hearing about it, because there’s nothing fundamentally new about any of this.  This blog began about a decade ago and one of the earliest posts was about a (then) relatively recent European Court ruling in the MS v UK case – that was an Article 3 ECHR finding whereby a man suffered inhumane and degrading treatment in a police cell, after difficulty in ensuring his timely admission to hospital under the MHA.  (Apologies for again stressing this: his legal action was against the NHS for failing to get him out of custody and admitted in a timely way for treatment, not against the police for anything the officers did or didn’t do.). Potentially...

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A number of questions in recent weeks about the types of location in which s136 MHA can be used.  —

In one recent circumstance, a presenter asked this in a training setting and one attendee quite fairly and promptly came back with “anywhere other than a dwelling”.  It’s as good an answer to give, unless you can quote the legislation but I want to go in to the reasons why we need to remember that this answer is, in the end, a short-hand summary of the legal situation.  It’s no doubt useful, but it is short-hand and it’s not what the law itself states.  I want to spend this post emphasising what the law in fact does state and why the short-hand can be problematic when it comes to some of the more unusual situations which do emerge.

First, let’s remember what sub-section, s136(1A) MHA states.  This is the section introduced in 2017 which altered the law away from the old “place to which the public have access” idea —

“(1A) The power of a constable under subsection (1) may be exercised … [anywhere]...

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