Mental Health Taskforce

Baroness Tyler of Enfield Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Prior of Brampton]

My Lords, we have strayed somewhat from the subject. On the money, the Prime Minister announced an extra £1 billion in January. It is the same £1 billion and is within the £8 billion—or £10 billion—that was in the settlement in November. The Government asked Paul Farmer to set out in his report where the priorities are and where the money should be spent, and that is exactly what has happened. Interestingly, I saw Don Berwick last week. He is a very distinguished American with a lot of experience in patient safety and health improvement. There is no question: it is going to be tough. It will be very difficult to do on around 7% of GNP, but there is absolutely no doubt, from the work of the noble Lord, Lord Carter, and others, that there is a lot to go at. If it was not tough, we would not be going at it. We must take advantage of the fact that it is going to be tough by addressing some of the difficult issues which we should perhaps have addressed in the past but did not.

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield (LD)]

My Lords, the task force report, which I greatly welcome, points out that, while mental health activity accounts for some 23% of what the NHS does, it accounts for roughly half of that in NHS spending. Worse still, years of low prioritisation within the NHS have meant that clinical commissioning groups have often diverted money earmarked for mental health spending to areas of physical health, and that is harder to quantify because of obscure methods of data collection. Could the Minister say what steps the Government propose to take to ensure that the extra £1 billion announced, whether entirely new or not, is actually spent on improving mental health services. How will that be monitored in practice?

[Lord Prior of Brampton]

My Lords, that is clearly a very good question. At our level, we will monitor this through the mandate given to NHS England. Within that mandate, it has told all CCGs that they must increase their spending on mental health services by, I think, at least 3.7%. The noble Baroness will be interested to know that in the first six months of this year the increase in spending on mental health has been 5.4%, so it is higher than the stipulated 3.7%. Over the next five years I think we will see a trend towards more money going into mental health and primary care and away from acute care. We should not underestimate the very difficult impact that will have on many of our acute hospital services. The transformation will be very difficult. We may not agree on how much money it will take but I think we all agree in this House on the direction of travel—that it must be right for money to be spent in those areas. I hope that answers the noble Baroness’s question.