Mental Health

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Thursday 14th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Paul Burstow]

That is an important and challenging point, and I will want to go away and think about what we do. For patient safety, we still need to learn lessons when things go wrong in our system, acknowledge when things have not been done properly and put them right. In that sense, confidential inquiries are an important part of the learning mechanism. One point of frustration that I hear in debates in the House and see in correspondence from hon. Members is the sense that lessons are not learned. As part of our reforms, with the NHS Commissioning Board taking on responsibility for patient safety, we need to ensure that that is not the case in future.

We are investing £16 million in “Time to Change”, and we were delighted when Comic Relief decided to put in an additional £4 million, one of the biggest grants that it has ever made.

I wish to make another point that touches on the contributions of my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne and the hon. Member for North Durham. One in five people still think that anyone who has a history of mental health problems should not be allowed to hold public office. How many former Presidents, Prime Ministers or Ministers would have been excluded if that view had been applied? [Hon. Members: “Churchill.”] Precisely. Such a law is as outdated as asylums and as outdated as many of the attitudes that sit behind it. It has to be consigned to the history books just like asylums have been, and under the coalition Government’s watch, it will be. I congratulate the hon. Member for Croydon Central (Gavin Barwell) on securing a slot for a private Member’s Bill on the subject.

Looking ahead, although we have made progress there are still big challenges to tackle. Reference has been made to the implementation framework that will be published to support the roll-out of the “No health without mental health” strategy. That framework has been produced in conjunction with five national mental health organisations—Rethink Mental Illness, the NHS Confederation, the Centre for Mental Health, Turning Point and Mind—and many others have been involved.

We have previously had a very good debate about “Listening to Experience”, Mind’s excellent report on acute and crisis care, and Mind’s policy team have been directly involved in ensuring that the framework delivers on those issues. It will provide a route map for every organisation with contributions to make to improve the nation’s mental health. It will spell out how progress will be made, measured and reported.

What does success look like? To me, it means more people having access to evidence-based psychological therapists; services intervening earlier, particularly for children and young people; services focusing on recovery and people’s needs and aspirations above all; and service users and carers being at the heart of all aspects of planning and service delivery.

Today, economists tell us that mental ill health in this country costs £105 billion a year, and that is just in England. If we succeed and put in place the right combination of public health, anti-stigma policies, accessible psychological therapies and excellent community and acute services, we can dramatically reduce that figure. Put another way, if we can deliver the right evidence-based treatment to children and young people so that their conditions do not persist into adulthood, we can prevent as many as two in five of all adult mental health disorders. As a society, we have made huge progress in how we recognise people’s mental illness, but despite that we have not fully accepted that mental health is equal to physical health and that parity of esteem is needed between the problems of the body and the problems of the mind. That is the challenge—

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

Will the Minister give way?

[Paul Burstow]

I will.

[Dr Lewis]

I have waited many years to intervene on a Minister in his final sentence, and I have achieved that today.

Does the Minister accept, having made a convincing case for people being able to live with their illnesses by being at home, that part of the reassurance that they need to do that is to know that in periods of acute crisis, there will be a bed available for them should it be needed? That should be not only for detained patients but for voluntary patients.

[Paul Burstow]

One thing I did not say—I was trying to cut down my remarks—was that there is an essential need to give more people the ability to control their health care through crisis plans. Crisis plans are an opportunity for people to make a statement in advance on how they wish to be treated in the event of a mental health episode that requires an intervention from mental health services. We know that when the plans are in place, they make a huge difference to the need for admission, and that they can reduce the length of stay. We need to ensure that there is a sufficiency of beds so that people can get appropriate treatment, but we also need to ensure that there is much more focus on good, community-based intervention at an early stage. Getting that balance right is always difficult for health commissioners to achieve—I know my hon. Friend is struggling with that in his patch at the moment.

Those are the challenges the NHS faces. They are challenges not just for our health commissioners and providers but, as this debate has clearly demonstrated, for our whole society. We can transform mental health in this country only if we transform our attitudes. This debate plays an important part in that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

Unlike the doctors who have spoken from the Conservative Benches, my hon. Friends the Members for Bracknell (Dr Lee) and for Totnes (Dr Wollaston), who spoke with such expertise, I have absolutely no medical qualifications whatsoever, but that has not stopped me giving my opinions on this subject in the past, and I am afraid that it is not going to stop me today.

I see from the index on my website that this will be the ninth speech that I have made on the Floor of the House or in Westminster Hall on mental health. Many of those speeches were supported by my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Mr Walker), and I do not think we will ever hear a finer speech than the one that he made today. In passing, I pay due credit to the hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones), whose interest in these matters I have known about for a long time, although not his personal history.

The speeches that I have made in the past have tended to concentrate on three themes: the importance of separate therapeutic environments for people who have to be admitted when they are acutely mentally ill—it is obviously unwise to have psychotic patients cheek by jowl with people suffering from suicidal depression, for example; the importance of single-sex wards, particularly in mental health units, although that applies to the NHS hospital network as a whole; and the importance of making adequate bed numbers available for people who require periodic admission to a mental health unit.

We heard from the Minister about the new emphasis on recovery-based programmes, and I am all in favour of that. There is everything to be said for that, but even its most ardent advocates do not deny that there will always be a need for in-patient beds for some people some of the time. I am concerned that the cuts imposed on in-patient beds may mean that if we are not very careful indeed there will be enough beds available in future only for people who are sectioned. Those people who wish to receive the support and the underpinning—the fall-back position—of an in-patient bed when they are experiencing an acute episode may be unable to secure one.

It has rightly been said that a debate at national level brings out the best in people in the House of Commons. However, the debate at local level does anything but bring out the best, given some of the schemes, plans and measures that have been introduced. In that connection, I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander) who, in a measured and thoughtful way, made a speech that has become all too familiar to me. She talked about the way in which Granville Park in her constituency has been scheduled for closure on the basis of a consultation that she regarded as somewhat suspect.

I refer the hon. Lady to the Adjournment debate on the Floor of the House introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Burton (Andrew Griffiths), who discussed similar techniques that were used in his constituency, and to my own experience with the Southern Health Foundation Trust, which used a similar method to make 35% cuts in in-patient beds for acutely ill adults, even though bed occupancy figures were consistently over 90%. The pattern seems to be something like this: they hold a consultation; they make assertions based on, at best, subjective surveys of what they say people want; they then rely on pseudo-independent “expert” research, which usually turns out not to be independent at all; and finally they bulldoze their pre-existing plans through.

Therefore, to take the message that Mr Speaker always used to give when teaching the art of rhetoric, which is that a speech should have at most two main points, the main point in my speech is the need for the objective monitoring of statistics so that when we are reconfiguring services we at least know whether there really are spare beds before we close services down.

I would like to be fairly positive in this debate, brief as my contribution necessarily is, so I would like to say that the health overview and scrutiny committee of Hampshire county council, despite the harsh words I have had to use about it in the past, appears to be taking on board some of my concerns by seeking to ensure, as it has stated in its minutes,

“that further bed reductions are being safely managed”

and that it is

“made aware by the commissioner and provider should future acute inpatient bed demand regularly exceed bed availability in the service.”

I think that it is terribly important that in the process of reconfiguring we do not simply say that we are recreating a new system in the community while decimating the system that allows people the safety net of an acute bed during those episodes when they are really ill. As I said in my brief intervention on the Minister, if people are to have the confidence to get on with their lives and know that they can have useful and fulfilling careers even while living with and managing a mental illness, it is absolutely vital that they also know that, on the rare occasions when they really need the ultimate support of a few nights or even a week or two in an acute unit, a bed will always be available for them.