Children and Young People with Complex Needs

Debate between Darren Henry and Maggie Throup

Friday 10th December 2021 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Maggie Throup)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Sir Charles Walker) for securing this important debate on care for children and young people with complex needs, and thank him for highlighting good practice in his constituency and across his local authority.

The Government are committed to ensuring that all children and young people who need care—be that health or social care—receive the safe and compassionate care that we should all expect. We are taking action to support all children and young people’s mental health, and to support those with complex needs to stay well in the community. This support starts at birth.

The Chancellor recently announced £300 million for family and early years support in half of upper-tier local authorities over the next spending review period. This includes: £100 million to roll out bespoke parent-infant mental health support to nurture parent-infant relationships, and improve access to perinatal mental health support; £50 million to fund evidence-based parenting programmes; and £82 million to create a network of family hubs. In addition, the Chancellor confirmed £200 million for the supporting families programme, increasing the number of families supported by the programme from 70,000 in 2021-22 to more than 100,000 in 2024-25.

For school-age children, we continue to implement the proposals of the children and young people’s mental health Green Paper. In March, we announced £79 million to boost mental health support for children and young people in England. Part of that will accelerate the roll-out of mental health support teams in schools and colleges to cover around 3 million children and young people by 2023. In May, the Department for Education announced funding worth £9.5 million, which will allow up to 7,800 education settings in England to train a senior mental health lead from their staff in the next academic year.

We are also taking steps to support children and young people with learning disabilities and autism through our newly published national autism strategy, the first autism strategy to be extended to children and young people as well as adults. The strategy is backed by over £74 million for the first year. That includes £3.5 million to help local systems identify children and young people on waiting lists who might be at risk of crisis, and £3 million for respite and short breaks to help families and autistic children and young people with and without learning disability who have struggled during the pandemic.

The independent review of children’s social care, which commenced in March 2021, will look at the needs, experiences and outcomes for the children supported by children’s social care. We know, sadly, that there are some children and young people who will need in-patient care or a place in a secure setting. NHS England is accountable for the provision of in-patient mental health services for children and young people. In line with the NHS long-term plan, some of the commissioning tasks and relevant budget have been delegated to NHS-led provider collaboratives.

[Darren Henry]

My understanding of the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne was making is that we should make sure that the investment goes into residential care. The Minister is talking about the money and the investment being put into in-patient care, but that should really be put into residential care. Will she please comment on that? In addition, taking that a step further, should areas with residential care and the staff equipped to deal with children with complex needs not eventually get people into supported living so that we can ultimately get them into independent living?

[Maggie Throup]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point, and I will come to that later in my speech.

The lead provider works collaboratively with other providers to ensure the appropriate level of in-patient provision in their area; it is important that we have the right mix of provision, whether it is in-patient or community support. They also ensure that the right community services are available to support children and young people when they are discharged to prevent further crises.

Wherever possible, collaboratives will aim to provide high-quality alternatives to admission. However, where stays are required, they should be short and close to home in a high-quality, safe and therapeutic service. We must of course ensure that the rights of children and young people who are placed under the Mental Health Act 1983 are respected.

We published our White Paper on reforming the Mental Health Act in January 2021, setting out proposals to make the Act work better for people. We are committed to ensuring that the reforms we want to make to the Act also benefit children and young people. We will work to ensure that the rights we plan to introduce for patients are also available to children and young people detained under the Act. Reforms to the Act will limit the scope to detain people with a learning disability or autistic people, helping to reduce unnecessary detentions. To ensure that in-patient settings are therapeutic for autistic people, we are providing £4 million to enable in-patient settings to become more autism friendly.

In children’s social care, we are committed to doing everything we can to support local authorities in ensuring that the most vulnerable children are protected and that there are sufficient places for children in their care. The Government have given more than £6 billion in un-ringfenced funding directly to councils to support them with the impact of covid-19 spending pressures, including in children’s social services.

I take the opportunity to refer briefly to the a point made by the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care in the House a few days ago. He set out that we will be taking further measures to support and protect social care against the threat posed by the omicron variant. We will set out a package of measures at the earliest opportunity. I reassure hon. Members that the timing of the announcement will not have an impact on our ability to implement those protections on the intended date.

The Government are also taking additional steps to support local authorities to fulfil their statutory duties. The spending review 2021 announced £259 million over the spending review period to maintain capacity and expand provision in secure and open residential children’s homes. That will provide high-quality safe homes for some of our most vulnerable children and young people.

We recognise that those in the secure estate are some of the most vulnerable in our society. Children and young people in secure settings are more likely than other young people their age to have additional healthcare needs. The integrated care framework aims to support trauma-informed care, and formulation-driven evidence-based whole-system approaches to creating change for children and young people within the children and young people secure estate.

My hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne talked about beds. In the NHS long-term plan, we committed to investing at least an additional £2.3 billion in mental health services by 2023-24. That will see 345,000 children and young people a year accessing NHS-funded specialist mental health support if they need it. On 5 March, we announced an additional £79 million of funding that will be used to expand children’s mental health services significantly in this financial year. It will also help to improve access and reduce waiting times for NHS community mental health support.

There is much to be said about how we are supporting and should further support children and young people, not least those who, because of mental illness, learning disabilities, being autistic or complex trauma, are some of the most vulnerable in our society.