“I welcome the Care Quality Commission’s report into the state of mental health care services. We issued our own report recently into Mental Capacity Assessments and Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards, which are used by care providers to assess people’s ability to make decisions for themselves when in a care setting or hospital. In that report, we said any measures put in place to protect people from harm should be the least restrictive possible.
“In the last year, up to one in five of all complaints we received about adult social care had an element of Mental Capacity Assessment or Deprivation of Liberty Safeguarding within them. And of those we investigated in more detail, we upheld 69% - higher than our 53% average.
“People should be treated fairly and they should have the right to make choices for themselves unless they have been formally assessed as not having capacity.”