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Hilary Patrick and Nicola Smith, ADULT PROTECTION AND THE LAW IN SCOTLAND Hayward's Heath: Bloomsbury Professional, 2009. xxxvi + 227 pp. ISBN 9781847664877. £38.

Document Cited authorities 3 Cited in Related
Vincent
Published date01 May 2011
Date01 May 2011
Pages327-327
AuthorFrankie McCarthy
DOI10.3366/elr.2011.0045

The Adults with Incapacity (Scotland) Act 2000, the first bill to be passed into law by the Scottish Parliament, launched a period of significant reform in the area of adult protection in Scotland. Two further pieces of new legislation, the Mental Health (Care and Treatment) (Scotland) Act 2003 and the Adult Support and Protection (Scotland) Act 2007, have combined with the remnants of the earlier provisions on local authority powers to act, and the influence of domestic and international human rights obligations, to create an innovative structural framework for dealing with vulnerable adults. The rapid pace of reform and the intricacies of the new legislation are likely, however, to prove bewildering both to practitioners of various stripes in the field and, most importantly, to the adults who may find themselves the subject of the law. Hilary Patrick and Nicola Smith seek, in this text, to offer a clear roadmap to the new legislative landscape, an aim which they achieve with considerable success.

The authors lay the foundations of their guide to the law in chapters 2, 3 and 4 of the book. Chapter 2 provides a concise and easily comprehensible overview of the three key pieces of legislation, in each case defining which adults are covered by the statute and then addressing the scope of the Act, the potential uses of the provisions and the information needs of relevant parties where the provisions apply. Chapter 3 identifies and explains the roles of the key organisations and individuals in the area. Chapter 4, perhaps most importantly, sets out the shared principles which underpin the overall picture of the reformed law of adult protection. An understanding of these principles is likely to be critical in determining how the legislation will operate in practice, and the concise summary offered by the authors here offers a solid basis for their examples of the law in practice elsewhere in the text.

Subsequent chapters use these foundations to deal...

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