Social Care and the Role of Carers

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Thursday 24th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, I salute the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly, as she makes her way off to her new defence portfolio. I want to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, in turning the House’s attention to the often forgotten part of social care: mental health social care.

I put it to the Minister that, as we sit here watching, as we have done for the past year, an unfolding mental health crisis with an unprecedented level of mental health problems in the general population, and waiting for the legislation following Sir Simon Wessely’s review and the Government’s response to it, now is the time, with popular support, to change radically the way in which we fund and devise mental health support. We need to ensure that adults of working age have access to skilled mental health support, to enable them to remain in work. We also need to do what my colleagues in Sutton local authority have done: find the money to support mental health staff in schools so that children can get through this challenging period with some resilience.

In mental health, it is often said that the NHS gets lots of resources and local authorities get lots of responsibilities. They do. They have huge responsibilities for commissioning mental health social care. At the moment, they are running those on resources that are pretty well exhausted. We need a system whereby people have quick access to emergency preventive support and to crisis support of the kind that we provide very well when we have resources; and whereby, when people have had episodes of acute care in hospital, their Section 117 aftercare, to which they are entitled, is actually there, and they are supported back into work. If we do not have that, we will simply have a generation of people who are not earning the capital to fund their future care needs when they are older.

I also want to do one thing that I do not think we have done today: acknowledge that communities of people of colour and LGBT communities are disproportionately hit by all this, as they have been disproportionately affected by Covid.

I finish by asking the Minister two specific questions. First, what assessment have the Government made of his department’s convened Mental Health and Wellbeing Advisory Group’s recommendation that we need £1.1 billion of investment in mental health social care budgets? Secondly, when will the Government publish their response to that group’s recommendations, after committing to review them in a mental health winter plan? If we leave this, it will become more than urgent; it will become an acute and endemic problem. We need to seize the time now to deal with it radically.