Mental Health Provision: Children and Young People

Alex Chalk Excerpts

Tuesday 12th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Luciana Berger]

My hon. Friend pre-empts a question that I was going to ask of the Minister, because it is not clear whether the pilot that the Government are going to introduce is based on a four-week waiting time for assessment or a four-week waiting time for treatment. Those two things are very different. In many parts of the country, young people will sometimes have an immediate assessment but then have to wait weeks, if not months, to actually access the treatment that they need.

[Alex Chalk (Cheltenham) (Con)]

The hon. Lady speaks with passion and authority on this subject. As the Member of Parliament for Cheltenham who has witnessed this explosion in adolescent mental health problems, I share her concerns. Does she agree that as well as looking at cure, we need to look at prevention and to understand why this explosion is taking place? The time has come for a really good, authoritative body of work to get under the bonnet of why these problems are arising as they are.

[Luciana Berger]

I thank the hon. Gentleman from the bottom of my heart for that intervention, because that is the crux of the point that I am seeking to make. I have sought to highlight some of the issues in the Green Paper, and I will highlight a few more, but the greatest problem is what is not in it—namely, what we can do to prevent mental ill health in our young people rather than deal with and treat it when they become mentally unwell. I will come to that in a moment.

The Royal College of Psychiatrists eloquently states what I believe, which is that the Green Paper lacks

“a suitable scale of ambition or speed of action.”

The royal college reminds us that in the Health Education England mental health workforce plan, which sets out the posts for which the NHS aims to recruit from now until 2021, there are no new consultant psychiatrist posts for children and young people’s community services—none at all. Yet we know that there is a massive shortage of child psychiatrists in our country.