Mental Health Treatment and Support

Debate between Debbie Abrahams and David Davis

Wednesday 7th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)]

As we have heard from colleagues from all parts of the Chamber, we are in a mental health crisis. Unfortunately, it is becoming increasingly endemic. I pay tribute to the work of our offices, including my own team, who regularly deal with critical cases of mental ill health, including suicide calls, for which we have had to put on special training. That was happening before the pandemic too, and we need to recognise that.

Recent figures show that seven out of 10 secondary school children are expressing mental health distress. That should worry us. It has already been mentioned, but we know that there are risk factors and risk conditions that can contribute to the onset of a mental health problem. I will speak about the importance of early intervention a little later.

Oldham has the 37th highest prevalence of mental health disorders in the country. That puts it in the highest 20% in the UK; for reference, the Prime Minister’s constituency is in the lowest 6%. On the other side of the coin to this higher prevalence is our reduced funding. Research from the Children’s Commissioner found that child and adolescent mental health services in Oldham received over £100 less in spending per child from the Government than those on the Isle of Wight. Similarly, in 2019 The Guardian reported that London had nearly double the number of psychiatrists in the north of England. As I have mentioned, it is true that things have got worse since the pandemic, but that is not just a consequence of the pandemic.

I want to focus on what needs to happen, because we need a serious plan, and I am not from the Minister’s speech that the Government recognise that. The Opposition want to recruit thousands of new mental health professionals, which will go some way to addressing the lack of parity of esteem between mental and physical health services. That needs to be reflected in the Government’s NHS workforce plan. We have waited ages for the Government to produce that and it makes the partygate report look quite prompt. As the Government sit on their hands and fail to produce a plan, the crisis continues to get worse. That is why we will commit to the biggest expansion of the NHS workforce in history. We must also look at the metrics we use. For example, we would guarantee treatment within a month. That would make such a big difference to all those people stuck on what feel like endless waiting lists in Oldham, Saddleworth and across the country.

Finally, I am pleased to see our party committing to a paradigm shift from the medical to the social model of health, focusing on prevention in communities as well as treatment. The Leader of the Opposition has committed himself to that in Labour’s health mission, and we have also pledged that there will be a mental health hub in every community. We will go further than that: our commitment to addressing the rampant health inequalities across our country includes tackling the inequity in mental health. As we develop national policy from education to transport and finance, we will consider the impacts on health and health inequalities, including mental health. This is the difference a Labour Government will make. The next Labour Government have a plan that is both radical and credible, and for my constituency and for our country, it is long overdue.

[Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. You will be well aware, because you have chaired many of the debates, that there has been a campaign in this House for over a year to stop SLAPPs—strategic lawsuits against public participation—which are used by very rich men to oppress free speech in this country. Just in the last hour or so, the High Court has ruled one of those SLAPPs cases out of order: the case of Mr Mohamed Amersi against the ex-Member of this House Charlotte Leslie has been struck down. In my view, that is a great victory for free speech. Because it is so important, I give notice that I will be raising the matter on the Adjournment.

Debate on the Address

Debate between Debbie Abrahams and David Davis

Tuesday 10th May 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Davis]

My right hon. Friend is right. He has been the icebreaker in this argument, which I refer to as the Redwood argument. We have record tax collections this year because of fiscal drag and for a variety of other reasons, including underestimates by the Treasury. That is money that we should give back to the people. We do not need to balance the budgets twice over. We need to get that right.

There are respects in which we need to reinforce or increase what is in the Queen’s Speech. My favourite line in the Queen’s Speech is the same every year:

“Other measures will be laid before you.”

We are Conservatives. We believe in a property-owning democracy. Governments of all powers and all persuasions for 30 or more years—since Margaret Thatcher, in truth —have failed on that issue. Two thirds of my generation bought their own home; today it is a quarter. That is a scandal. I approve of the Prime Minister talking about the right to buy for housing associations—I should do; I first came up with the policy in 2002 when it was my responsibility, and we still have not implemented that policy. However, it will not solve the problem. We are at least a million houses short, in a period in which the population has increased by 7 million. We are about 100,000 houses a year short in what we are constructing, in addition to that million.

We need to find a way of addressing the issue that does not hit what people call the nimby problem, in which people, when objecting to things, talk about protecting their environment. We need to find a way around that, and we need to look very hard at what was done in the 1920s with garden villages and garden towns. We need to use the increased wealth that they create to pay for the community centres, surgeries, schools, roads and wi-fi that are necessary. There would be plenty of added value to make the farmers rich at the same time. Politically, it would not be straightforward, but it would be an easier policy than we might think.

We Conservatives are also believers in social mobility. I think all Members are believers in social mobility. We used to be the best on that in the developed world; now we are among the worst. When inequality is greater, social mobility is more important. Indeed, the only real moral argument for an unequal society is that everybody has an opportunity and a chance to take part. In the last 20 years or so, the top 1% of the population have roughly trebled their income whereas the median has roughly flatlined, so there is a stronger argument for social mobility today than there was before.

The best mechanism for social mobility is the education system, and there are some good proposals in the education Bill in the Queen’s Speech. Adding to the academy system will help at the margins, however, and will not solve the problem; it has not solved it for the last 20 years and it will not solve it now.

The great scandal is that half of children from free school meals families are failed by the education system by the time that they are 11. They cannot meet the requirements in English or mathematics to make progress in education, so their lives are effectively over in terms of social mobility at that point. We need to get a grip of that, which means re-engineering our classrooms and helping our brilliant teachers with more artificial intelligence, more software support and more augmentation. The technology is there now—it exists, it is proven and it is available. I hope that the House will not laugh too much when I say that I went to see it demonstrated at Eton of all places, where it was brilliant at bringing on the weakest children.

[Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)]

Does the right hon. Gentleman recognise that if a child is hungry, as many of our children are because they are living in poverty, that will not help their educational attainment?

[Mr Davis]

I agree entirely; I have arguments that I will not deploy today on universal credit and so on that relate directly to that point. One of the outcomes of having a technologically augmented teaching and assessment system, however, is that the teacher knows within days if a child has a problem that they did not have before and if their educational performance suddenly falls, perhaps because the parents have separated, there is trouble at home, they are going hungry or whatever. The hon. Lady is right and I agree with her basic premise, but technology would help even with that if we did it. I want to see us do that and deal with the scandal.

The last area that I will speak briefly about is the fundamental one of healthcare. We all support the national health service and no doubt applauded the brilliant staff—doctors and nurses—who did a fantastic job. We tell ourselves over and over again that we have the best healthcare system in the world, but that is simply not true. We have those committed doctors and we now spend more than the OECD average on healthcare, but we are not delivering more than the OECD average. Whether it is on survival rates in all the different categories of cancer care, coronaries, strokes, diabetes or whatever, we are not doing as good a job as we should be for the money, work, skill and commitment that go into it.

My argument is that we should look at the other countries that are doing better than us, such as Germany, France, Estonia, Austria, Sweden, Canada or Australia. They all have different systems that are all free at the point of delivery. I was a beneficiary of the Canadian system, which is an insurance-based system that is free at the point of delivery and supported by the state if people cannot afford it—and it works better than our system. We need to look at those other systems and learn from them. We need to stay with the fundamental principles of the health service but learn and improve what we can.