The Mental Capacity Amendment Bill has finally gone through Parliament and is awaiting Royal Assent, due to be implemented in Spring 2020 after consultation on the Code of Practice later this year. It has progressed better than Brexit with marginally more agreement but considerably less media interest! The Cheshire West case in 2014 highlighted that the most vulnerable group in our society needed a high level of protection, rather than the watered down DOLs we had been seeing before that. It would appear that the controversy that has dogged the Amendment Bill has been getting the balance between high level of protection and not costing too much in resources. We will see with time how successful this has been.

The role of the care home manager is now reduced compared with early proposals and is now subject to the LA deciding whether to do it themselves or ask the care home manager. Although an improvement, this is likely to be less carefully considered the busier and more stretched the LA is. We have seen this happen so much in safeguarding where enquiries are handed over to the care home not because the quality of the care home and manager warrant this but because the LA has few options with their scarce resources. That is only going to get worse with more cuts to LAs. The other change that has been challenging is the definition of what constitutes a deprivation of liberty. The inability to agree on this has led to no definition and no doubt the argument will continue with the draft Code of Practice. That effectively leaves us with the Cheshire West definition but a more manageable stream lined process for dealing with it. It won't be any easier to get agreement by postponing it and does have the ring of Brexit delays to it.