Liberty Protection Safeguards (LPS)

The Liberty Protection Safeguards were introduced by the Mental Capacity (Amendment) Act 2019 as the government's intended replacement for the Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards (DoLS). According to the Department of Health and Social Care's collection of LPS material, 'LPS will provide protection for people aged 16 and above who are or who need to be deprived of their liberty in order to enable their care or treatment and lack the mental capacity to consent to their arrangements, in England and Wales', extending the safeguards to 16 and 17 year-olds and to settings such as supported living and people's own homes, which DoLS did not cover.

Despite the 2019 Act receiving Royal Assent, implementation has repeatedly slipped. DHSC originally aimed to implement the LPS by April 2022, but in a letter to the LPS National Steering Group in December 2021 confirmed that 'the aim to implement the LPS by April 2022 cannot be met'. A public consultation on updating the Mental Capacity Act Code of Practice to incorporate LPS guidance ran in 2022, but as of the most recent published guidance the safeguards had still not come into force, and DoLS has continued to operate as the applicable regime in the interim.

The intended purpose of the reform was to streamline what had become a resource-intensive, backlog-prone DoLS process, moving responsibility for authorising deprivations of liberty away from a standalone application process and integrating it more closely with a person's overall care planning, while retaining independent oversight of decisions that deprive a person of their liberty for their care or treatment.