Mental Health Services

Lord Graham of Edmonton Excerpts

Thursday 25th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Graham of Edmonton (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure and a privilege to take part in any debate in this House but I am very grateful to have put my name down to make a small contribution in this Short Debate. The House demonstrates the quality of its service to the nation when people are able to stand up from their own experiences and ideas to stimulate the Government and others into thinking again about how things are done. I begin, as I have many times before, by thanking the staff of the Library for producing such an excellent document to give us a guide. It is not the first time and they never let us down, so I am very grateful. The trouble is that it is like going into a self-service just for a snack. By the time you have decided to be serious, you have read all the briefing—and I did read it all—so you realise that you rely upon other people to give you a nudge and a guide.

It is at least 80 years since I could say that I was a young person of the kind we are talking about. I was 90 about a month ago, so I can reflect on the nature of childhood as it was when I was a child and childhood now. Of course, there is no comparison for the bleakness of the ability of your mum and dad to provide you with toys, outings, books or encouragement, as my dad was on the dole for 10 years from 1930 to 1940. I passed my 11-plus but could not go because of my circumstances. Eventually, I got a degree from the Open University—a BA. I got an honorary MA afterwards and then became a member of the Privy Council. We need to recognise that the challenges before young people and their parents in the present years are completely different from the challenges when I was a boy in the 1920s and 1930s.

I congratulate my noble friend Lady Thornton on the comprehensive way in which she introduced the subject. She has a point of view and she has answers to the questions. I do not have many questions and I have no answers to any of them. The Minister will realise, as I do and the House does, that the money available in the budget plays a major part. The problems can be exposed, as they are in this debate. Every person who has spoken has a contribution to make. The idea that there is a solution to every problem is not new. There is a solution but it is a question of priorities with the money available. One thing that strikes me about where we are falling down is that there is a lack of co-ordination among the various services. In other words, this is not a political issue—except on the budget, which we could say something about if it was necessary. It is about co-ordination between the services.

One gets terrible news almost every week of a problem among the police, the press or media, or the schools. In the phrase that came before, what has happened to all the reports? What we are debating is not brand new. There is very little in it that we have not had warning about in the past. We have to try to recognise that, while the heart is in the right place, it is sometimes difficult to exercise what one knows to be needed because there are priorities. I would be happy to speak about my own list of priorities but that is not the point here. The problem that the Minister and his colleagues have is: what can we do with the limited resources that we have? It ever was that the amount of money available at any time is insufficient to do everything that one needs.

I have been very impressed by what I have heard this afternoon. What we need is a Minister who will go away and look at the manner in which people slip between the various services. With all the various agencies that there are, it ought not to be possible to slip between. Yet whenever there is a scandal of some kind, it is revealed that the evidence which could have been acted upon was available but not conveyed to the proper people. One thing that the Minister should take away, in a busy life and with limited capacity as far as money is concerned, is to ask his colleagues to come up with ways in which they can collectively make sure that they look at the needs of young people now. More than ever before, they are at risk.