§ 2.48 p.m.
§ Lord MolloyMy Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper.
§ The Question was as follows:
§ To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they will intervene to prevent the sale of land which would otherwise be available for hospitals by the South West Thames Regional Health Authority.
§ Baroness TrumpingtonMy Lords, the Government have no plans to intervene as suggested.
§ Lord MolloyMy Lords, first, may I congratulate the noble Baroness on her new Government position. I hope that she will take full advantage of it to stop some of the evils which her Government propose to inflict on the British people. Is she aware that since I tabled this Question there is now the proposal that the Surrey cluster of hospitals—the six hospitals which are the centre of research for all forms of psychiatric and mental treatment—are about to be closed completely, and that 570 acres of valuable Surrey land is to be sold off? Does the noble Baroness not appreciate that this proposal—which has already upset the whole range of psychiatric professional people from top flight consultants to nurses—is causing great distress, and that the Government ought to have second thoughts?
§ Baroness TrumpingtonMy Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Molloy, for his welcome to what I have always considered to be a rather specialised arena of refined bull-baiting, of which he is no mean master. I entirely disagree with the latter part of his statement. I visited two of the cluster of hospitals to which he referred, yesterday—Banstead and Horton. These hospitals were built at the turn of the century and they had two main aims. The first was to protect society by providing custodial care; and the second was to protect the patient by providing him with a secure shelter. A remote site in the country met both objectives.
Ideas have now changed. The numbers have fallen very much in recent years from what was originally
planned. The authorities are in agreement about the possible sale—and in fact sale as soon as possible—of the first of these hospitals in order to provide money which could be well spent by the local authorities to provide the modern form of mental care for patients. All the people, so far as I was able to ascertain yesterday, were in full agreement that the sale should proceed.
§ Lord MolloyMy Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Baroness for that reply, and particularly that point where she said that the money will go back to the NHS. The South Thames Health Authority has stated categorically that when the 5,000–odd psychiatric patients who have homes on the land and the few thousand nurses who have homes on it are all removed, the estimate is that the value of the land will increase fifty-fold. I understand that the Government have decided to abolish the Green Belt restrictions to aid the authority to sell this valuable land.
§ Baroness TrumpingtonMy Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Molloy, is jumping the gun over everything he has said. The people employed by the hospital in question, to which I think he is referring, live in an estate outside the grounds of the hospital. There is only the one hospital about which discussions are being carried on at the moment. The most important thing is to look at the estate as a whole and therefore when it is possible to release money, to develop local services for mentally ill and handicapped patients.