Wrong touch regulation: The limits to effective regulation of approved mental health professionals

Approved Mental Health Professionals (AMHPs) hold essential decision-making authority on whether individuals will be subject to compulsory detention under the Mental Health Act 1983 (as amended 2007) in England and Wales. Despite exercising profound coercive powers affecting individual liberty, the regulatory architecture surrounding AMHP practice is fragmented and diffuse, with oversight distributed across the Care Quality Commission, Social Work England, and multiple professional body regulators, and with no single body holding end-to-end accountability for decision quality. The dominant regulatory approach in contemporary UK health and social care is Right-touch Regulation (RTR), developed by the Professional Standards Authority and articulated through successive iterations since 2009. RTR presents itself as a model of proportionate, targeted, and risk-based intervention: a 'third way' between heavy-handed oversight and regulatory absence. The central claim of this article is that Right-touch Regulation, as currently utilised by the PSA, is structurally unsuited to AMHP oversight. The model presupposes conditions that are not present in AMHP governance. Situating RTR within broader regulatory theories (responsive regulation, smart regulation, and harm-based regulation), the article reviews what RTR claims as lineage but omits in practice. The conclusion argues that, until the preconditions for proportionate regulation are established (visibility, ownership, feedback), the language of Right-touch continues to legitimate a system that does not effectively regulate at all.