Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services Debate
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Baroness Stuart of Edgbaston
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Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services
Baroness Stuart of Edgbaston Excerpts(9 years, 10 months ago)
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Norman Lamb
My hon. Friend makes an important point, and there are many excellent mental health services, as the hon. Member for somewhere in Birmingham—[Interruption.]—for Halesowen and Rowley Regis (James Morris), said earlier. If some areas can do things well with the available resources, then other areas can too. It is also true that some areas have chosen to cut funding for children’s mental health, in my view inappropriately.
Ms Gisela Stuart (Birmingham, Edgbaston) (Lab)
Birmingham is one of the fastest growing younger cities in Europe—40% of its population is under 25, and 30% under 15. Combined with local authority cuts of £281 per head in the next financial year, and a totally dysfunctional commissioning system, does the Minister seriously think that even the good intentions of the children and young person’s taskforce will address the problems we already have, as well as those that we can see coming but have no means of remedying?
Norman Lamb
Again, I gently make the point that we all, on both sides of the House, have to recognise the need over the next five years to make better use of the resources available. The hon. Lady’s own party does not propose ring-fencing local authority funding for the provision of mental health services at the lower tier level. We all have to work on making more effective use of the money, and I genuinely think that the taskforce is an opportunity to modernise how we organise services, particularly commissioning—having four different commissioners does not create the best chance of co-ordinating services.