Children’s Mental Health Week 2024

Debate between Amy Callaghan and Tim Loughton

Tuesday 30th January 2024 Westminster Hall

[Amy Callaghan (East Dunbartonshire) (SNP)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Tooting (Dr Allin-Khan) on securing this debate and the passion and professional experience she brought to her contribution.

The contributions we have heard so far highlight how important it is to take action to improve children’s mental health and address the root causes and aggravating factors leading to poor mental health in children. As the MP for East Dunbartonshire and the SNP health spokesperson, I am fully committed to tackling the underlying causes of mental health issues. The key themes I want to reiterate are improving support for children who are struggling with their mental health, and poverty as a key driver of poor mental health. Addressing that is key, to ensure children are not taking on the burden of this Tory Government’s financial mismanagement.

I will start with support. The theme of this year’s children’s mental health week is “My Voice Matters”. It is important that we acknowledge in this place that we are here to represent our constituents and give a voice to those not feeling heard. It is our responsibility to advocate for those families and ensure that, when children are struggling with their mental health, they are met with support and a listening ear.

It is also important to note that LGBT young people are more likely to struggle with their mental health. It is no wonder, really, when the rhetoric in this place and from the Government constantly undermines and questions young people who may already be struggling with their identity. Instead of questioning and doubting these young people, we all have a duty to understand and support our young LGBT constituents. That is why the Scottish Government recently announced additional funding for a new project to support LGBT children and young people’s mental health. LGBT Youth Scotland will receive £50,000 to establish a new mental health LGBT youth commission. The commission will explore barriers and the challenges young LGBT people face when accessing mental health support and services. That will involve listening to young people and their lived experience to help inform future work, designing targeted and tangible solutions formulated by the LGBT Youth Scotland mental health ambassadors.

The SNP believes that supporting children’s wellbeing should be rights-based, strength-based, holistic and adaptable. That is why, in 2021, the Scottish Government published the whole school approach framework to assist schools in supporting children and young people’s mental health. The Scottish Government’s mental health transition and recovery plan also emphasises a health-promoting and preventative approach to mental health and wellbeing. The preventative approach is something we have heard about from across the Chamber today, so I am delighted to represent the SNP in that regard.

Education and the time children spend in schools have a large part to play in that approach, through raising awareness and understanding, and supporting the positive mental health of children and young people. Included in the framework are considerations for local authorities and guidance for schools to develop and embed policy in practice within schools and the wider community, and to support them in evaluating their mental health practices and identify areas for improvement. It is essential that schools, where children spend so much of their time, are equipped with the proper tools and knowledge to support children and ensure their mental health is prioritised and understood. That is why the Scottish Government also continue to support local authority partners with £60 million of funding to ensure that every secondary school has access to counselling services. The Scottish Government have also published a mental health and wellbeing strategy built around the three pillars of promote, prevent, provide: promoting positive mental health and wellbeing; preventing mental health issues occurring or escalating, while tackling underlying causes; and, of course, providing mental health and wellbeing support and care.

That leads me to the other major theme I want to highlight, which is tackling the underlying and aggravating causes of poor mental health, the most prominent being financial pressures and the impact of the Tory Government’s cost of living crisis. Childhood should be a time of happiness and freedom. Children should not need to worry about their family’s finances or whether they will be warm and well fed, a point explored by the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), who is no longer in his place.

[Tim Loughton]

Yes, I am!

[Amy Callaghan]

Oh, sorry, you’ve just moved.

Low-income families with children continue to be disproportionately hit during the crisis. It is no surprise that that has had an horrendous impact on mental health. When families are in fuel and food poverty, struggling to keep warm and fed, the stress is certainly not limited to parents, as mentioned by the hon. Member for Tooting. It can aggravate specific mental health conditions, including, but not limited to, eating disorders.

The cost of living payments from the British Government have been one-off flat-rate payments. That means that a single person receives the same as a family of five. Research has shown that single-person households saw their income rise by 6% thanks to those payments, which is of course welcome, whereas for families with two or three children, the increase was only 3.3%. The Work and Pensions Committee’s cost of living payment report states that the failure to provide extra support for families is notable and should be examined further by the UK Government. Unfortunately, the response from the British Government rejects the idea that cost of living support payments should take account of family size, despite that being a common sense recommendation based on data and fairness.

We in the SNP are deeply concerned about the UK Government’s welfare policies. Instead of heaping additional pressure on low-income families, the British Government need urgently to address the fundamental issues with universal credit. One particular example is ending the two-child limit and the rape clause, a policy that I am afraid would be kept by any future Labour Government. The End Child Poverty Coalition analysis estimates that almost 90,000 children in Scotland are impacted by the two-child limit, and ending it could lift 250,000 children—15,000 of whom are in Scotland—out of poverty. This British Government’s political choice to keep and force kids into poverty is simply to the detriment of children’s mental health across these isles.

Meanwhile, the Scottish Government have lifted 90,000 children out of poverty with ground-breaking, game-changing policies such as the Scottish child payment. We in the SNP are not the only ones who are concerned and calling on the British Government to end the two-child limit. The chief executive of the UK Committee for UNICEF, Jon Sparkes, said:

“We urge the UK government to take steps to protect all children from poverty, starting by making child poverty reduction a government priority, scrapping the two-child limit policy and benefits cap, and improving services and support, especially for the youngest children”.

I ask the Minister this: why is reducing child poverty not an ambition of this Government? We in the SNP call on the British Government to scrap the benefit cap and to introduce an essentials guarantee to ensure that universal credit is set at a level that allows households to cover essential costs such as food and utilities. As much as the Scottish Government progressively mitigates the policies of this place, 85% of welfare expenditure and income replacement benefits remain reserved to Westminster. That is why social security policy should be fully devolved to the Scottish Parliament.

Adverse childhood experiences are of course a significant factor in a child experiencing poor mental health, as outlined by the hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse), who chairs the childhood trauma all-party parliamentary group. ACEs and the trauma associated with them are, by and large, linked to poverty. I sat on and chaired children’s panels in the central belt of Scotland before being elected to this place. I saw at first hand the trauma that ACEs and poverty can cause to children and families. The SNP Scottish Government’s strategy of investing in people, investing in children, would work much more significantly if our hands were not tied by this place.

It is clear that the Scottish Government have the willingness and the ideas to help children’s mental health. We just need the powers. It is abundantly clear that, no matter which party forms a British Government after the next election, ending child poverty will not be a priority. Only with the full powers of independence will we be able to tackle the root causes of child poverty and improve the mental health of children in Scotland, continuing the Scottish Government’s current ambitions as an independent nation.