It is surprising how often proverbs turn out to be true – and none more so than the proverbial observation that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I came across a striking example of this phenomenon when I visited one of our local Citizens Advice Bureaux the other day.
The particular paving stones in this case are the clauses of the Mental Capacity Act. These are designed with every good intention to protect vulnerable elderly people who have diminished mental capacities.
Basically, the Act establishes a set of bureaucratic and judicial processes. These are deigned to ensure that, if an elderly person has not given what we used to call a Power of Attorney to a relative or someone similar while they still had full possession of their mental faculties, then the Court of Protection will protect them from being exploited by anyone unscrupulous who seeks to take personal advantage while purporting to look after their affairs.
As I am all too well aware from my postbag over the years, this set of bureaucratic and judicial processes can cause very considerable difficulties even when it applies to the elderly people whom it is designed to protect.
But, as I discovered from the CAB, the real problems begin when the system is applied to young adults who have just turned 18.
Parents with children who suffer from severe learning disabilities typically put a fantastic amount of effort and devote an extraordinary proportion of their lives into looking after those children. And, of course, while the children in question are under 18, the parents are in a position to make decisions on their behalf in the normal way.
But, as soon as children become 18, they are covered by the new Mental Capacity Act, just as if they were elderly and vulnerable. So, all at once, the parents – who have been looking after them up to the point of their 18th birthday with such care and love – lose the right to speak for their children or to organise their affairs. And, since the children are very often not able to speak or decide for themselves about a whole range of things, the only way forward is to navigate through the complexities of the Office of the Public Guardian and the Court of Protection.
Successive reams of forms and payments are involved – and the net result at best is simply to let the parents go on doing what they will have been doing over the past 18 years, but with the ever-present danger of unnecessary and counter-productive intervention from the well-intentioned authorities.
Now that the CAB has brought all this to light, I am going to initiate a debate on the subject in the House of Commons, in the hope of persuading the Ministry of Justice to look again at this. Maybe we could have a simple system in which the parents are allowed to go on acting as parents in such cases after the child becomes 18, unless there is some very particular reason to the contrary?
But I can already half hear the sound of all those good intentions whispering quietly about the risks involved in any simple solution of that sort …