Children’s Mental Health Week

Lisa Cameron Excerpts

Thursday 6th February 2020 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Ms Nadine Dorries)]

It is a pleasure to respond to the excellent speech by the hon. Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Preet Kaur Gill), and I thank her for securing this important debate. I also thank the Members who made interventions, to which I will respond, with your permission, Mr Deputy Speaker.

I do not recognise some of the scenarios that the hon. Lady described. I have not read her article, but if she would like to give me a hard copy, I would be delighted to read it. She is obviously passionate about this subject. I have been in the House all morning, but I have had time to glance at the Children’s Society report that was published today. I was delighted to see that the Children’s Society highlights that the Government have made huge efforts to tackle mental health stigma through tireless work with schools and the Every Mind Matters campaign, which has reached 1.3 million people countrywide.

I am pleased that this debate is occurring during Children’s Mental Health Week. Today is also Time to Talk Day, which encourages everyone to be more open about their mental health in an effort to end mental health discrimination. It is going to be difficult to achieve parity of esteem between mental and physical health until we can completely eradicate the discrimination associated with mental health.

Our most recent data shows that one in eight five to 19-year-olds has a mental disorder. When it comes to young women and girls, the data is even more striking. Young women and girls are more at risk of self-harm, with about three times as many young women and girls aged 10 to 19 self-harming compared with men. The suicide rate for women and girls between the ages of 10 and 24 is at its highest on record, and it has nearly doubled since 2012. So I am with the hon. Lady on her concern about mental health and young people, and I am particularly concerned about the mental health of young women.

Those figures are heartbreaking. However, as the recent Children’s Commissioner’s report highlights, there have been major improvements to children and young people’s mental health care in recent years. I think it is important that we accept that. We need to get to that place so we can look forward to where we take these improvements.

I would like to mention Claire Murdoch, who is the clinical lead in NHS England responsible for the delivery of mental health programmes, as highlighted in the long-term plan. Claire described this to me yesterday as a bath that had been left empty for a very long time which suddenly had had the funding taps switched on—but we cannot fill the bath from empty to full immediately. The bath is filling, and it is filling with the £2.3 billion that this Government have committed to mental health. Just to put that into perspective, that is over half of the entire prisons estate budget. That is how serious our commitment is to addressing parity of esteem and mental health, particularly the mental health of children and young people. We will continue to drive forward this progress to ensure that every child can access the high-quality mental health care that they deserve.

[Dr Lisa Cameron (East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow) (SNP)]

I refer the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

Funding for mental health has increased right across the United Kingdom from when I first started in the field. However, we are really trying to raise awareness at the same time, and the more we raise awareness, the more we increase the demand. Increasing awareness and demand is a good thing, but we need many more psychologists to be working in the field alongside the psychiatrists to meet the demand.

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[Ms Dorries]

One of our announcements has been to launch the trailblazer schemes, which we are hoping to have in 25% of schools by 2024. I do understand the problem in the hon. Lady’s area. I recently spoke to a headmaster at a school in Birmingham, and he told me that a third of the pupils in his school were receiving pastoral care or mental healthcare, and the reason was that a third of his children came from chaotic homes where either one or both parents were addicted to gambling, drugs or alcohol. As a consequence of having a third of the school roll in this situation, the school had serious problems with the children in the school.

So in some areas the challenges are very difficult. The hon. Lady said that we cannot just throw money at this, but the money has to fund the services—that is where it has to start, and then the workforce have to come.

The trailblazer schemes are doing incredibly well. I went to see one in Hounslow recently. We have committed to having 50,000 more nurses and are trying to train more mental health nurses, and we are having great success in getting people through universities and through the right courses and into schools. The school I visited in Hounslow, where the mental health workers were working for the children, was incredible to see. I spoke to a large group of the children who are receiving mental health support during the day, and they told me that they are being taught coping strategies. One young boy, whose name I will not mention, said to me that he suffers from anxiety—he gets anxious—and they have put an app on his phone so he has his time to be anxious and panic. His app time is at six o’clock, and he will go on to his phone and use his app.

There are so many aspects to the care being provided in school. There is early intervention, spotting mental health problems as they begin very early on. They could spot eating disorders almost as soon as they were arising in young girls. There are also issues such as anxiety and depression, and others that may not wholly be mental health-related but where the presentation of the problem was a mental health issue.

We are hoping to have 25% of schools across the UK covered by 2024, but, as I said, the bath was empty, so when we turn the tap it cannot fill straight away. The work has started. The people are being trained; they are being rolled out in schools right now, as we speak. I can say that early intervention, having seen it at work myself, is working. That was reassuring, because 18 months ago there were none of those teams in schools; there was no early intervention in any school anywhere. So the fact that we are watching these teams roll out into schools is incredibly reassuring.

On eating disorders—I will work my way through my speech, just to make sure I cover every aspect—more young people are getting the treatment they need. There has been a significant improvement in treating times in NHS care. An extra £30 million is being invested every year into children’s eating disorder services and there are 70 new or expanded community-based teams covering the whole country. Nationally, we are on track to meet the target of 95% of children and young people with an eating disorder accessing treatment, with a one-week referral for urgent cases and four weeks for routine cases.

I went to an eating disorder unit a week last Friday and met some of the young women there. It was fantastic to see the work being done. Once the young women go in, they have to stay in for quite some time. I am not sure that many people realise that an eating disorder is the deadliest mental health condition. One in four young women die from their eating disorder. It is the only mental health condition where the person suffering from it is scared of getting better. It therefore presents an incredible challenge to the mental health professionals who are working with those young girls. I saw the new eating disorder unit up and running, the work it was doing to turn the young women around and the investment that has gone in. The unit is managing to turn those young women around in a shorter time; it is just fantastic to see.

While recognising that we are still filling the bath and that there is more to do, what I really want to do is celebrate—I do not think that the hon. Lady will blame me for doing so—the good work being done by NHS professionals, including doctors, mental health nurses and those coming out of universities, to work on our trailblazer schemes in schools with young people. I want to celebrate their achievements. I am also very pleased that, after years of under-investment, NHS funding for children and young people’s mental health service is now rising and will continue to rise as we work towards the goals set out in the long-term plan. Funding for mental health services will grow faster overall in the NHS budget, in real terms worth at least £2.3 billion. The funding for children will grow faster than the funding for mental health care, which will grow faster than the overall NHS budget. This transformative investment will mean that by 2023-24 an extra—this is an important figure—345,000 children and young people from nought to 25 will receive mental health support every year.

Of course, some children will unfortunately experience a mental health crisis and will need rapid mental health support. I, like others across the House, am pleased with the strong focus on crisis care in the NHS long-term plan, which sets out investment of about £250 million in crisis care. I am not sure who mentioned A&E and hospitals; maybe it was the hon. Lady. We now have, in almost all A&Es across the country—I think it is 97%—a mental health liaison worker.[Official Report, 12 February 2020, Vol. 671, c. 9MC.] When somebody—a child or an adult—presents at A&E with a mental health condition, they are now seen by an A&E mental health liaison officer.

I am aware, however, that there is also a need to provide more support in the community, and to encourage early intervention and prevention. In fact, most of the £2.3 billion that has been allocated to mental health is for community services. Tim Kendall, NHS England’s national clinical director for mental health, says that no mental health service is ever better provided in a hospital than it can be provided in a community, except for the most serious cases. That is why we are delivering a new school and college-based service to help children and young people, staffed by a new workforce, through our children and young people’s Green Paper on mental health. It is about encouraging partnership working between services, and bringing together health and education to provide early intervention mental health support for children.

[Dr Cameron]

The Minister is being extremely generous in giving way. There is a lot of good work being done, as she has underlined, but one of the gaps—this is often raised by Members across the House—is autism diagnosis and intervention at an early stage, so that children get the support they need with the least detriment to their learning, development and education. She may not be able to respond today, but perhaps she could let me know about that at some point.

[Ms Dorries]

It would not be appropriate for me to respond to that because autism is not in my brief as a Minister. That comes under the Minister for Care, my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Caroline Dinenage), but I will make sure that the hon. Member gets a response to that question.

To turn to the children and young people’s mental health Green Paper, every school will be encouraged to have a senior lead for mental health as well as access to mental health support teams, which are the trailblazer schemes.