National Marriage and Mental Health Awareness Weeks

Debate between David Amess and Barbara Keeley

Thursday 16th May 2019 Westminster Hall

[Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this debate with you in the chair, Sir David. I congratulate the hon. Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) on securing the debate, and I thank hon. Members who have contributed to mark this unusual mix of Mental Health Awareness and National Marriage weeks.

Many points have been made on the value of marriage and family life, including in the excellent opening speech by the hon. Member for Congleton and by the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon)—I think I beat him by two years in how long I have been married. Happy anniversary for each of our relationships. The hon. Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) focused on family relationship issues and poverty, and the role of family breakdown.

In line with my brief, I want to bring this debate back to mental health, because it is Mental Health Awareness week and we could explore some issues there, too. I feel that, no matter how strong a family are, there will be times when they need support from outside—when they need the services that the state can provide to help them to cope. If those services are not there when they need them, it can cause immense strain for everyone involved. This is every bit as true for mental health as it is for physical health services.

We do not expect families to cope with a broken leg or a cardiac problem on their own, so we should not expect them to cope with depression or an eating disorder without professional support. I want to question whether we really are doing all we can for families where one child is living with a mental health condition and they need help. Whatever our best intentions, the fact is that we are not yet doing the best we can for children and families.

According to the British Medical Association, spending on mental health care equates to only 11% of our UK NHS budget, despite accounting for 23% of the burden of disease in the UK. As we know, there is increasing demand for mental health care, with patient numbers increasing across a range of conditions. It might be time to look at that number and decide whether it should be greater, particularly for children and young people. We know that one in eight five to 19-year-olds has at least one mental disorder, but that only 6% of the mental health budget is spent on services for children and young people. I believe it is time we questioned that, because such a gap has serious consequences for children and young people with mental health conditions.

Some 400,000 children and young people who have a mental health condition do not get to see a professional at all. Instead, they have to cope with informal support. More than one in four of the children and young people referred to specialist child and adolescent mental health services in 2016-17 did not have their referral accepted. As the Children’s Society analysis showed us last year—it is a very disturbing statistic—a quarter of 14-year-old girls and nearly one in 10 boys had self-harmed in a year.

I commend Sky News and their reporter Paul Kelso for a great piece of investigative work that sheds light on the experiences of children and young people in private mental health units, many of which take young people hundreds of miles from their homes and families. The report of this work was shown yesterday. One such young person is Natasha, who is now rebuilding her life after a lost decade spent in such units. Natasha has anorexia and escalating self-harm, and she hit crisis point when she was only 12. She then spent 10 years in private mental health units dotted around the country. She says she reached her lowest point in a mental health unit in a privately run hospital in Maidenhead. In that unit, she experienced brutal restraint, which she describes as follows:

“They would pin you up against the wall, smack your head against the wall, drag you across floors, wrap you round doorframes...People sat on your head and on your legs…this would be big men, not women.”

That was the unit where she said she did

“the worst amounts of self harm”

that she had ever done in her life. Despite Natasha’s history of self-harm, she was left unattended with razors and cut herself 26 times. She needed 200 stitches.

The constant threat of self-harm is a massive strain and worry for parents when their daughter is hundreds of miles away. A mother with a daughter in one of the units that was shown in the Sky News film described how when she wakes up she thinks, “Is she all right? Will she manage to achieve her self-harm aim today?” She added, “You are hundreds of miles away. If anything happened, you would not get there on time.” As the Sky News report showed, the toll of self-harm and suicide in these units is too high. Natasha explained how she lost 24 of her friends to suicide in such mental health units, including three or four in one unit alone.

Hon. Members here today will know how it feels when a desperate constituent tells us about their child’s mental health condition and the struggle they face being unable to get their child access to the services they need. This is intolerable. We have seen mental health services being underfunded—I know the Minister will tell me about the future funding that is coming in, but we have to think about where we are today—and we know that mental health budgets fell by nearly 8% between 2010 and 2015. Sadly, we are still seeing one in 10 commissioning groups unable to meet the investment standard expected of them by the Government, which means they are failing to give mental health services the funding priority they need. We must do better than that.

In 2017, Labour set out a clear plan for how we would do better than that. I want to touch on those points. Over the past decade, mental health spending has been a part of broader NHS budgets, but as budget pressures emerged, NHS trusts and commissioning groups raided their mental health budgets to prop up services elsewhere. To that end—I know the Government have not been keen on this—Labour would ring-fence mental health budgets, which is important to ensure that the money that those services need is not siphoned off to fill gaps elsewhere.

As we think about children, young people and their families, it is important that we question why only 6% of mental health spending goes to services targeted at children and young people, despite them making up some 22% of the population. Labour would dramatically increase the proportion of the mental health budget spent on children and young people.

Following on from what I said about yesterday’s Sky News programme, we would end the disgraceful practice of sending people hundreds of miles for mental health treatment when there is no good reason to do so. In the past year, sadly we have seen the number of inappropriate out-of-area placements rise from 640 to 720, despite a Government pledge to reduce their use. I see these out-of-area placements as a tragedy for families. They jeopardise the recovery of people receiving treatment and force parents and other family members to travel long distances to support the young person. With Mental Health Awareness Week, let us not persist in treating mental health as the Cinderella service of the NHS, and children and young people’s services as the Cinderella service inside that Cinderella service.

My plea is this. Let us help children and young people in need at the time of their need, rather than making them wait 18 months to get specialist support or letting them end up in very long-term placements in locked mental health units far from home. Let us do something about the fact that the number of autistic people detained in inappropriate in-patient facilities on dubious mental health grounds remains stubbornly high, and includes a rise in the number of children in what have been seen as modern-day asylums. Let us do better. We can do better than this for our children and young people and their families.

[Sir David Amess (in the Chair)]

Just before the Minister responds, I should have announced at the start that, because the second debate was cancelled, this debate could actually continue until 4.30 pm. I will leave it with hon. Members.