Disabled People: User-led Organisations

Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts

Wednesday 8th June 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Ramsbotham]

I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Wheeler, for obtaining this debate. I shall be brief. I declare an interest as a former adviser and now vice-president to the former Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health—now the Centre for Mental Health—because I wish to comment particularly on the mentally disabled. I want to concentrate on an area in which the treatment of the mentally disabled is not good, has not been good, but—it has been announced—is going to be better. My concern is that what appears to be happening in the user-led agency is likely to deny a way of putting that right. I refer to the well of psychiatric morbidity in Her Majesty’s prisons, where it is reckoned that at least 70 per cent suffer from some form of identifiable personality disorder—and some a great deal worse.

For the past four years, the centre has been concentrating on two aspects of work—the treatment of those who are mentally disordered in prisons, and the problems faced by those with mental disorders in obtaining employment. The employment issue is linked with prisons, but the centre has more generally been looking closely at the employment of people with mental health problems in the community. It has become abundantly clear that the key area for achieving independent living for the mentally disabled is employment, and that the best way of achieving that is through individualised support based on their sort of sustainable lifestyle and what they can actually do. That requires careful identification and then placement. The Centre for Mental Health is currently supporting nine centres of excellence, which are using an individual placement and support model across the country. That model is based carefully on this business of finding out what each individual needs. What also applies to it is having people trained as individual placement and support workers who have been attached to user-led and other organisations because they can advise those organisations on how best to look after people who come and work with them.

One problem in prisons at the moment is that no structured mental health treatment is available for this vast number. I was much heartened by the Government's paper, Breaking the Cycle, in which the Justice Secretary said that they were at last going to tackle this problem. Indeed, I have had discussions with the Department of Health as to how this might be done. However, having heard what the centre had come across, particularly about the user-led organisations, one idea that struck me was: what better thing to do than to localise this by employing local user-led organisations to go into prisons and help people who, after all, will come out of prison and whose employment will be out of prison. I was therefore very concerned when I heard that there were threats to the user-led organisations, which looked like being one of the key tools in resolving a problem.

I was encouraged to speak because one of the great messages that I got from the Sainsbury centre was that my noble friend Lady Campbell was challenging the Government on the cuts that were being imposed and asking them to spell out the impact that they might have on user-led organisations. Always being happy to support my noble friend, I felt that I would add this other area, which I would be most grateful if the Minister could look into—not least to alert the Ministry of Justice that there is a potential problem here, which could be solved before causing more problems than it deserves.