Mental Health and Unemployment

Baroness Primarolo Excerpts

Tuesday 24th February 2015 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for Disabled People (Mr Mark Harper)]

I thank the Backbench Business Committee for approving this debate and my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Burstow), my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Mr Walker) and the hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones)—but like my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne I will call him my hon. Friend for the purpose of this debate—for securing it.

I am afraid, Madam Deputy Speaker, that I will try your patience by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne on his OBE, which he collected this morning. I can see from your furrowed brow that you were not aware of that, but you are now. He has been congratulated rather a lot today, but I felt that it would have been remiss of me not to do so from the Dispatch Box.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. One can never be congratulated too much, and it is right that the hon. Gentleman’s contribution should be acknowledged.

[Mr Harper]

I am grateful, Madam Deputy Speaker, that you were also able to join in the congratulations to my hon. Friend and embarrass him still further.

It has been a very good debate. It is an important matter for our constituents because mental health conditions are very common, with one in six people being affected at some time in their life. That statistic has been mentioned a few times, including by my hon. Friend the Member for Windsor (Adam Afriyie) who put on record his contribution on the subject early in his parliamentary career. All Members made the clear link between mental health—whether good or bad—and someone’s employment position. Many Members also highlighted the fact that labour market outcomes are poorer for people with mental health conditions than for the population as a whole and those with health conditions in general. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton and Cheam and others said, the vast majority of people with mental health conditions want to work.

I listened carefully to the statistics that my right hon. Friend quoted about people with severe mental health problems. In the spirit of trying to cheer him up a little, noting that he referred to some positive data from the Time to Change campaign about the changing views of employers on mental health, let me reassure him that although I am not in any way complacent, as the gap between those with a mental health problem working and those generally working is significant and far too wide, there was at least some improvement between the last quarter of 2013 and the last quarter of 2014, when the employment rate for those with a variety of common mental illnesses went up by 2.6%, with a further 70,000 people in employment. That is obviously positive and a step in the right direction. I will not overclaim for it, as it is just a step, but perhaps it shows that the good work of the organisations involved with the Time to Change campaign means that employers are open both to keeping people who develop a mental health problem in work and to employing people with mental health problems. We might be seeing the start of improvement in those employment figures, but I do not want to claim more than that.

We are doing a lot, but clearly there is also more to do. I want to pick up on a couple of points mentioned by the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green). I absolutely agree with her comment early on in her remarks referring to employers who say that they would not employ someone with a mental health problem. She was absolutely right that if they employ a reasonable number of employees they almost certainly do, although they might not know that they do. Perhaps the employee does not know that they have a mental health problem either.

The statistics suggest that anyone who employs more than six people is likely to have at least one member of staff with a mental health problem. Perhaps they ought to look around their workplace, think about the people they employ who have a mental health problem and think about how well they support that person, not out of any sense of altruism, although it is of course the right thing to do, but, as the hon. Member for North Durham said, because it is the right thing to do for the business. The person will be more productive, will stay working for that business for longer and will be beneficial. That was a point well made.

Looking at the cast of characters in the Chamber, I recall clearly that three years ago my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne, the hon. Member for North Durham and my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton and Cheam, who was then the Health Minister, participated in a debate in which my hon. Friend and the hon. Gentleman spoke about their own personal experiences. They were both nervous during the debate about how their comments would be taken outside this place. I followed it quite closely, and it was heartening to see that their remarks were taken positively, not just by the organisations that one would expect—those that are familiar with these issues—but more widely and, interestingly, among members of the public. They kicked off an interesting process and since then a number of other right hon. and hon. Members have talked about their own experiences both inside and outside the House. It is right that more Members are encouraged to do that.

The hon. Member for North Durham put it very well when he said that the more we talk about these issues, the more we are open about them, the more the House debates about them and the more we talk about mental health issues in the same matter- of-fact way—I mean that in the most positive sense—as we do about physical health issues, without making a huge drama about them, the more employees and employers will be encouraged to have those sensible conversations in the workplace.

Members spoke about a number of support mechanisms. My hon. Friend the Member for Halesowen and Rowley Regis (James Morris) mentioned the improving access to psychological therapies programme and the shadow Minister referred to the various talking therapies that are available. Those programmes have a proven record of delivering and were started by the Labour party when it was in government. They have been continued by us and expanded. By next month, they will have been expanded so that 15% of people who could benefit will have access, covering about 900,000 people a year. Next year, we will introduce for the first time access standards and waiting time standards in mental health services, and an £80 million investment will ensure that 75% of people will receive the IAPT treatment within six weeks, and more than 50% of people who are experiencing their first episode of psychosis will receive a treatment within two weeks. There is more to do, but I think that that is significant progress.

The hon. Member for North Durham talked about the work capability assessment and the performance of Atos in delivering that. With just a teeny bit of partisanship, I will remind him that it was his party’s Government who introduced the work capability assessment and appointed Atos as the contractor. We inherited that arrangement and spent quite a long time putting it right. I detected in what he said that he is not the biggest fan of Atos, so he will be pleased to know that it is exiting the contract to deliver that service in Great Britain. In fact, Maximus takes over next week, and ahead of that, in the next few days, Members will receive a communication from that company. The hon. Gentleman will be pleased to learn that one of the areas that Maximus takes very seriously and has itself highlighted, and where it is keen to improve WCA performance, is mental health. I hope that he will engage with Maximus, using his local expertise and his personal experience, to help to improve that performance.