Mental Health Services

Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts

Wednesday 25th February 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ramsbotham (CB)]

My Lords, I begin by congratulating my noble friend Lord Listowel on securing this important debate and once again demonstrating to this House his intense and continuous focus on improving all kinds of services for children and young people.

A number of noble Lords have already mentioned the very welcome development by the National Health Service of the Children and Young People’s Mental Health and Wellbeing Taskforce. I want to build my contribution on a meeting held with the children’s group which is currently considering the mental health of children and young people. I was very struck by the fact that members of the group said that one of the problems they were finding as they were going round the country was a complete lack of co-ordination between what was going on in various ministries. They illustrated this by demonstrating to us that they were conducting eight pilots.

One of the pilots listed was a bid from the Black Country to,

“map and analyse commissioning of CAMHS … and other health funded out of area placements, with the aim of preventing the large numbers of children from the Black Country being placed ‘out of area’. … It will include commissioning urgent care … to include the focus upon delivering a Black Country wide solution to children and young people requiring admission to a place of safety (under Section 136 of the Mental Health Act.”

I thought that at the same time that the Ministry of Justice is developing this appalling idea of building the biggest children’s prison in the western world—called the secure college—which will contain a cohort of these very children from the Black Country, for whom the Black Country services are seeking to find a place of safety. To me, that is an absolute illustration of the lack of co-ordination which is inhibiting the development of satisfactory mental health services for this particular cohort.

I happen to chair three all-party interest groups at the moment: one on speech, language and communication difficulties; one on criminal justice, drugs and alcohol; and the Criminal Justice and Acquired Brain Injury Interest Group. I have had meetings with all three to discuss the agenda that they would like to put to the next Government and to ask them what problems were inhibiting them in achieving what they want to achieve. We have had a fascinating agenda. We are drawing it up with some care. Interestingly, time and again—and this very afternoon with the speech and language people—I was told that at a meeting NICE was not prepared to accept educational research in respect of improving the lot of people with SLCN.

I know the Minister understands this—he is someone whom the whole House respects greatly for the way he looks at things. Will the Government follow this line of looking and seeing how cross-government working can improve the services for this group because, sure enough, out in the field are all the people who want to do the work and are being inhibited in one way or another in a preventable way?