Mental Health and NHS Performance Update

Lord Warner Excerpts

Monday 9th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

I thank the noble Lord for his welcome. He is quite right, of course, that to deal with the problems of mental illness in every setting the staff need to be trained to spot them and do something about it. In the announcement today, a couple of things are relevant to his question. The first is on supporting schools and every secondary school having a mental first aid trained teacher, so they can spot the signs of mental illness and then refer them on if necessary, if they cannot deal with them themselves—although they will have the skills to deal with some instances. The other is the investment of £60 million—£30 million from government and £30 million from trusts—of digitally assisted mental health services, which will bring global digital exemplars for mental health. That will mean that we will be able to provide better information for both staff and patients about the quality of care and safety and effectiveness.

[Lord Warner (CB)]

I welcome the Minister to his new job and raise the issue of CAMHS and the security of funding for CAMHS. It is no good making fine words in this area. The raiding of budgets in this area has taken place in the NHS over a very long period of time. It is not just a question of ring-fencing for a short time; it is guaranteeing budgets over a longish period, so that staffing levels can be built up with people who are expert in this field. Will this issue be addressed in the Green Paper?

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

I thank the noble Lord for his question. He speaks with great knowledge and experience, particularly from his work in the Department of Health. There are two separate issues here. First, there need to be more resources, and we are providing those. Secondly, we need to make sure that those resources are applied in the right setting, so that money designed to support mental health goes there. The primary way we deliver that is through transparency: making sure that CCGs—which are, of course, independent of government and making clinical commissioning decisions based on local need—are reporting on the money they are spending and the services they are commissioning in mental health and then making sure that we work with NHS England to look at any CCGs where that is not happening. It is clearly wrong that money which is intended to support mental health does not do so, but the way to deal with that is to work with the CCGs where it is not happening and to make them report on their own performance.