Defending Public Services

Debate between Jeremy Hunt and James Morris

Monday 23rd May 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

It is a pleasure to sit on the Treasury Bench with my hon. Friend the Minister for Culture and the Digital Economy for the first time in several years. I will leave him to respond to that point, but I will make a broader point in response to the question from my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield, Southgate (Mr Burrowes) which is that the change we need to make in the NHS is to prevention rather than cure. If we can stop people becoming addicted in the first place, whether to drugs, alcohol or gambling, we will reduce costs for the NHS in the long term. That is the purpose of many of our plans.

Thirdly, a seven-day NHS requires a big improvement in access to 24/7 mental health crisis care, so that whenever a problem arises we are there promptly for some of our most vulnerable people. We will deliver that alongside our broader plans to enable 1 million more people with mental health problems to access support each year by 2020.

[James Morris (Halesowen and Rowley Regis) (Con)]

May I commend the Government for accepting the majority of the recommendations from the independent mental health taskforce and allocating £1 billion to implement them? The Secretary of State has been talking about system change within the NHS. To deliver on the taskforce’s recommendations, we need system change to make sure that we have the sort of mental health services that the people of this country deserve.

[Mr Hunt]

My hon. Friend speaks with great knowledge and as chairman of the all-party group on mental health. He is absolutely right to say that we need system change. The system change we need is to stop putting mental health in a silo, but instead to understand that it needs to be part of the whole picture of treatment when a person is in hospital or with their GP; it needs to be integrated with people’s physical health needs. We need to look at the whole person. We will not get all the way there in this Parliament, but I think the taskforce gives us a good and healthy ambition for this Parliament and I am confident we will realise it.

Mental Health

Debate between Jeremy Hunt and James Morris

Wednesday 9th December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

I accept that we need to improve the provision of mental health services for children, but I do not accept the hon. Lady’s characterisation. She will know that in the final Budget before the general election, the previous coalition Government committed £1.25 billion over this Parliament to improving child mental health provision and perinatal mental health support. That has been honoured by this Government, and we are in the process of working out how to roll that out. It is something that the Minister for Community and Social Care, my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt), spends a lot of time thinking about.

Before we discuss precisely what things need to happen—I think they should be done in a bipartisan spirit—we should recognise that really important progress has been made in recent years. I want to start with some of the achievements made by the previous Labour Government, who increased funding for the NHS and, within that, for mental health services. They oversaw a significant expansion of the mental health workforce and big improvements in in-patient care, with 70% of mental health patients being seen in private rooms. They increased the use of new drugs and therapies, including psychotherapy. Those were important steps forward.

Under the coalition Government in the previous Parliament, we saw a record investment of £11.7 billion in mental health services at a time of huge pressure on public finances. We passed the parity of esteem clause in the Health and Social Care Act 2012, something we Conservative Members are incredibly proud of. The first access targets were set for talking therapies for psychosis. We are starting to end the distortion that the right hon. Member for North Norfolk talked about, which saw targets for physical health access sucking resources away from local mental health provision over a sustained period.

We have seen particular progress in two areas. It is important to mention them; it provides encouragement that when we decide to focus on improving specific areas of mental health provision, we can make real progress. First, on talking therapies, the NHS is now recognised as a world leader. The number of people getting help from talking therapies quadrupled from 182,000 people starting treatment in 2009-10, to 800,000 starting treatment last year. The total number of people helped in the previous Parliament was 3 million, compared with just 226,000 people helped in the Parliament before that—a thirteenfold increase.

We are hitting the new access target to reach 15% of those needing it, although we are not quite hitting the recovery target; I hope we can put that right soon. That model is being looked at very closely by Scandinavian countries, and a pilot, based on what we have done here, is starting in Stockholm. We can be very proud of that important progress.

The last Parliament saw a 50% increase in dementia diagnosis rates, up from 41% at the start of the Parliament to 67% at the end of the Parliament—the highest dementia diagnosis rate in the world. We have 1.3 million dementia friends and 120 dementia-friendly communities. We have seen a doubling in funding for dementia research, with a new ambition to find a cure or disease-modifying therapy by 2025. In the spending round, the Prime Minister announced funding for a new dementia research institute; that will be another important step forward.

[James Morris]

The Secretary of State talks about the amount of money put into dementia research for very good reasons, but is there not a strong argument for building a research and evidence base around mental health? We need a commensurate investment in research on mental health, so that we can understand more about prevalence.

[Mr Hunt]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and I commend him for the work he does on the all-party group. The truth is that it is still early days when it comes to a proper understanding of mental illness. According to the latest Times Higher Education league table, this country has five of the top 10 health research universities worldwide, so we have a huge contribution to make to that research; he is absolutely right to make that point.

Health and Social Care

Debate between Jeremy Hunt and James Morris

Tuesday 2nd June 2015 Commons Chamber

[The Secretary of State for Health (Mr Jeremy Hunt)]

It is an honour to speak about health and social care in our debates on the Gracious Speech, because nothing matters more to this Government than providing security for all of us at every stage of our life, and nothing is more critical to achieving that than our NHS.

I start by welcoming the right hon. Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham) and his colleagues back to their positions. I will not take it personally that two of them want to break from debating with me to go elsewhere. However, it is a topsy-turvy world when the shadow Health Secretary who was the scourge of private sector involvement in the NHS now wants to be the entrepreneurs’ champion. As one entrepreneur to another, may I put our differences to one side and on behalf of the whole Conservative party wish him every success in his left-wing leadership bid? This is perhaps the only occasion in history when my party’s interests and those of Len McCluskey are totally aligned.

That is not to mention the hon. Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall), who is, in her own way, a kind of insurgent entrepreneur, taking on the might of the Labour establishment, in the mould of Richard Branson or Anita Roddick. Sadly, I fear that she will demonstrate that pro-business, reform-minded, centre-ground policies are as crushed inside today’s Labour party as they would have been in the country if Labour had won the election.

The shadow Health Secretary said countless times during the election campaign that the NHS would be on the ballot paper. He was right—the NHS was indeed the top issue on voters’ minds—but not with the result he had intended. So, just as he has now done significant U-turns on Labour’s EU referendum policy, economic policy and welfare policies, I gently encourage him to do one on Labour’s health policies too.

The Queen’s Speech committed the Government to the NHS’s Five Year Forward View and the £8 billion that the NHS says it needs to fund it. The shadow Health Secretary refused to put such a commitment in Labour’s manifesto, and I hope today he will change that policy so that we can have cross-party consensus on this important blueprint for the NHS.

[James Morris (Halesowen and Rowley Regis) (Con)]

Does the Secretary of State agree that one of the biggest challenges we face is to achieve parity of esteem between mental health and physical health in the NHS, and that the way to achieve that parity is by ensuring that mental health services are properly funded and that we have a culture change in the NHS that means that physical health and mental health are treated as the same?

[Mr Hunt]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and I want to thank him for his tireless campaigning on parity of esteem for mental health in the last Parliament. One in 10 children aged five to 16 has a mental health problem, and it is a false economy if we do not tackle those problems early, before they end up becoming much more expensive to the NHS as well as being extremely challenging for the individual involved. We are absolutely determined to make progress in that area.