Mental Health: Children and Young People

Baroness Thornton Excerpts

Wednesday 30th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare my interest, as in the register, as a lay member of a CCG. I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, on bringing us this debate. I know that we had a slightly false start getting here but we are here. The fact that so many noble Lords put their names down to speak in this debate, meaning we have only a few minutes each, shows that this is seen as an important issue across the House and that many of us are very concerned about the mental health of our children and young people.

I thank YoungMinds, Beat and the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health for their briefings. I also thank the Library. Like many noble Lords, I clicked on the links in the Library briefing and suddenly realised that they showed the journey we have been on for the last few years with some excellent reports that have been there for five or six years. The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee published its report in January. The Stem4 GP survey was published in December 2018. There was the excellent briefing from the House of Commons Library on children and young people’s mental health services. The National Audit Office published Improving Children and Young People’s Mental Health Services last October. The Care Quality Commission’s Are We Listening? A Review of Children and Young People’s Mental Health Services was published in March last year. There were debates in both Houses all the way through last year, averaging about one every couple of months or so. There was the National Health Service’s five-year forward plan, a publication on mental health well-being trends and so on.

I asked myself what the common thread running through all this was. It is the recommendations that noble Lords have highlighted in today’s debate. It really is time to stop talking and to start delivering. When will the number of weeks that children and young people are having to wait be reduced, by how much, and by what date? In a child’s life, 26 weeks is a huge amount of time and has devastating effects. My noble friend Lord Brooke and the noble Baroness, Lady Wyld, mentioned this. This seems to me to be a priority. When will the workforce be increased? The figure of an additional 4,500 was mentioned in the House of Commons PAC report of last December. Are the Government on track to deliver those relatively modest figures?

Finally, the last recommendation in the PAC report reads as follows:

“By April 2019, the NHS should set out to the Committee”—


that is, the PAC—

“what arrangements are in place to collect the data it needs to: set up a robust baseline, and monitor progress on children and young people’s mental health services in the ten-year plan … reliably measure patient outcomes; and fully evaluate … the Green Paper pilot areas to inform the national roll-out of services, including information from outside the NHS”.

That is by April, which is two months away. Are the Government on track to achieve that?