Draft Mental Health Bill

Lord Stevens of Birmingham Excerpts

Tuesday 28th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kamall (Con)]

The noble Lord makes a very important point from his own experience. I thank him for all his engagement and for educating me on what happens in the community. We must be careful because often, these issues are not simple or binary but are multi-faceted, and we then have different initiatives from the Government, which overlap. There is probably an incredibly complex Venn diagram of who is responsible, where the funding pots are and at what level you get the funding—is it local government, national government or philanthropy networks, for example? I would love to make it easy—but will I be able to?

Also, whenever you have change there are often winners and losers. Often, those who lose out because of change are very concentrated and make their voices heard, while the winners are dispersed and we do not hear them saying, “This is a great change.” Therefore, we must be very careful with any change in funding. However, the noble Lord makes an incredibly important point. We must ensure that we are not squeezing out civil society and pulling people in many directions, and that it is much easier to access finance. The noble Lord, Lord Glasman, made the point that as a Labour Peer, he is incredibly proud of 1945 and the welfare state, but that he worries that in doing such things, sometimes the state squeezes out local community groups and breaks the bonds in local communities. We must ensure that we get the right balance.

[Lord Stevens of Birmingham (CB)]

My Lords, I welcome the draft mental health Bill. Prime Minister Theresa May was right to ask Sir Simon Wessely to develop these proposals, which command wide support across the sector. It was pleasing to hear the Minister commit to the Bill’s passage through Parliament before, and hopefully well before, the next election. However, as a number of noble Lords have pointed out, to will the end is to will the means. The Minister will know that the Royal College of Psychiatrists and others, in the impact assessment for this draft legislation, have shown that to make this work in practice will require more people working in mental health.

To that end, if the Minister does not mind me banging a familiar drum, it is surely paradoxical that UCAS is reporting that only 16% of applicants for undergraduate medicine and dentistry got an offer this year. We are turning bright and brilliant young people away at precisely the time when the NHS, and indeed our mental health services in the future, will need their services. Deans of medical schools report that this year is the hardest in living memory to enter undergraduate medicine. Can the Minister give us a date by which the Government will declare their hand on the needed expansion of undergraduate medicine?

[Lord Kamall (Con)]

I am sure the noble Lord is aware that one of the things we found when looking at the shortage of doctors—even though we have more doctors than ever before—was that some people are likely to stay close to where they were trained. That is why, for example, we have opened the new medical schools, and we are bringing more doctors into the system. Clearly, that will not happen overnight, since training to be a doctor takes a very long time.

We are also looking at what else needs to be done at that level. There are other pathways, such as nurses becoming doctors after a certain amount of time. Clearly, international recruitment plays an important role there. Our aim is to have an additional 27,000 mental health professionals in the NHS workforce by 2023-24. We are investing money to achieve that, but again, it is a question of how long it takes for the money to get through. At the same time, we must ensure that by having this additional workforce in the NHS, we are not squeezing out the voluntary sector but ensuring that we are working in partnership with it.