Mental Health Provision (Children and Young People) Bill

Brendan Clarke-Smith Excerpts

Friday 18th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Munira Wilson]

The dashboard does not go into the level of detail required in the Bill. I will come on to the different bits of data that the Bill would require to be published, especially on waiting times. That is not particularly transparent, although the Children’s Commissioner requests some of that data on an annual basis. On the dashboard, the spending figures that are reported are not always accurate, which is why there have been a lot of independent audits. That is why I want to put it on to a statutory footing, to give some weight to it and to try to drive up the quality, so that we have that transparency and accountability.

When young people are not seen in a timely manner, often their condition deteriorates and then they have to be re-referred and go to the back of the queue. The data on waiting times from referral to assessment and from assessment to treatment by area are not routinely and easily available. My hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney) and I have had a long-running battle locally to try to access some of that data, because our case loads on children’s mental health are so high.

Every year, the Children’s Commissioner uses her statutory powers to request information from NHS Digital on referrals, waiting times and spending. The waiting times reporting in that analysis uses a proxy measure of two contacts, even though for a variety of reasons that can be misleading. We should not have to rely on the Children’s Commissioner’s requests, which may not always continue, nor should we have to rely on proxy measures.

Additionally, as the Children’s Commissioner makes clear in her report, the data she is able to access and publish, some of which comes from the dashboard that the hon. Member for Rutland and Melton (Alicia Kearns) referred to, is limited to the NHS and does not include the spending or activity in schools and local authorities, even though those services, as we have heard, are an important part of the vast and complex patchwork of mental health provision for our children and young people. We need a holistic picture.

[Brendan Clarke-Smith (Bassetlaw) (Con)]

I thank the hon. Lady for being generous with her time. Is she aware that the NHS and clinical commissioning group spend has increased year on year since 2016, and does she welcome that?

[Munira Wilson]

The hon. Gentleman may have missed it, but I did acknowledge earlier in my remarks that for the past four years, at an England level, the spending has gone up. The problem is that that does not always filter through to the local level. I highlighted earlier in my speech the postcode lottery whereby there is a tenfold difference between what is spent in Halton and what is spent on the Isle of Wight. It is increasing at the national level, but without tracking it and having transparency about what is being spent at the local level, we cannot be sure that it is always filtering through.

Where the NHS is committed, based on what the Government have asked of it, to increasing its spend on children and young people’s services as a proportion not only of NHS spending, but of mental health spending, the data is not very clear and the quality is not always very good, so we cannot track it at a local level.