Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts

Monday 30th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

That is an incredibly important point because good relationships are very influential on young people’s mental health, and the Green Paper will look at the role of family conflicts. My noble friend will be pleased to know that the Department for Work and Pensions is launching a programme to reduce parental conflict in conjunction with the Early Intervention Foundation. I hope that it will have some positive benefit in reducing parental conflict, which is, of course, one of the causes of mental illness.

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)]

Does the Minister accept that there is a wide variation in the offering of services between one geographical location and another? Will the Green Paper which is being prepared address this, and how quickly will it be resolved?

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

The noble Lord is right about variation, sadly. We had the CQC thematic review on mental health provision at the end of last week, which showed that 80% of specialist in-patient care is good or outstanding but that that is true of only two-thirds of community care provision, with around a third either requiring improvement or inadequate. That is clearly not good enough. Patchy provision is absolutely one of the things that we need to deal with. The best way of doing that is by expanding both the number of children being treated and the size and quality of the workforce, to help us to meet our targets.