Investing in Children and Young People

Baroness Keeley Excerpts

Wednesday 9th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab) [V]]

The past year has taken a toll on everybody’s mental health. According to the Government’s own former education adviser, more than 200,000 children have developed mental health conditions over the last year. Barnardo’s charity says:

“A defining impact of the pandemic has been on children’s mental health.”

After months of missed face-to-face education and time away from their friends, this is no surprise, and it is not a new problem. It comes on top of years of Government neglect of children’s mental health services, which has led to a situation where young people are pushed to breaking point before they get help.

The Health and Social Care Committee recently heard from two young people who described how services simply were not there when they needed them. One of them described being on a two-year waiting list for child and adolescent mental health services, and because he had that referral, he could not even access the support offered by charities while he waited. In his words:

“There wasn’t anything until things got so dire that it was the crisis team.”

As his mental health deteriorated, he ended up in A&E seeking emergency support, but that was only a sticking plaster.

If we do not provide the mental health support that our children and young people need now, we are simply storing up problems for the future when they hit crisis point. As Sir Kevan Collins has made clear, the Government had an opportunity to take bold action and put in place robust support services to help children recover from the past year. They have totally failed to rise to the scale of this challenge. Rather than having the kind of ambition shown by Labour’s children’s recovery programme, the Secretary of State and the Prime Minister have allowed the Treasury to dictate the terms and block any real progress.

We all know that the recovery funding provided falls far short of what is needed—of course, before that, the funding of children’s mental health services was inadequate. Even if the Government meet their targets for mental health support by 2024, there will still be 7.5 million children without access to mental health support at school. That means that early intervention and targeted support will be unavailable to the vast majority of children and young people, forcing them to wait until they hit crisis point and then have to access heavily rationed NHS services. In contrast, Labour’s plans would put a trained mental health counsellor in every school, providing the early intervention needed to support the mental health of our children and young people.

Across the board, the Government have failed to offer the support that our children need. They have had to be shamed into feeding children over the school holidays. Their latest holiday activity and food scheme proposes providing food for just 16 days over the summer. Not only is that scheme not covering every weekday, but in Salford it is set to reach barely one in five of the children on free school meals. That means that more than 10,000 children are going hungry in Salford alone.

While councils have stepped up in the past to make up the shortfall, we cannot expect them to keep doing so when they are already overstretched and underfunded. Rather than continuing to try to do this on the cheap, will the Minister finally do the right thing and agree to feed every child who needs it across the whole school holidays until the end of the pandemic?

Further, after a year that has taken a real toll on disabled children and their families, the Government’s proposals contain nothing specific to help them recover. The Disabled Children’s Partnership found that four in five disabled children have seen their support services withdrawn over the past year, and three in four are now socially isolated. At the start of the pandemic in March 2020, the Government took sweeping steps that allowed local authorities to stop providing many services to disabled children. While similar provisions related to care for adults were repealed this spring, there has been no change for children’s services.

Will the Minister confirm that not only will the Government ensure that all funding for those services is reinstated urgently, but that more funding is put into the services to help disabled children to catch up? Half an hour of tutoring a week will not make up for a year of missed speech and language therapy, which is why we need a dedicated plan to help disabled children and their families to recover from the pandemic. The Government could and should show more ambition, and I urge them to change their approach to ensure that our children do not end up paying the price for Government incompetence.