Mental Health: Young People

Lord Patel of Bradford Excerpts

Thursday 9th February 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Patel of Bradford (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Massey for giving us the opportunity to debate this important and pressing issue. She has great expertise in the care and welfare of children and young people, which is evident in all the contributions that she makes to the House. It has been an interesting debate and noble Lords have raised a number of important questions. I look forward to the Minister’s response; given the challenging environment, I do not envy him.

The Government pledged £1.25 billion for improving children’s mental health services and £250 million to improve CAMHS provision for each year of this Parliament. However, in spite of these commitments at a national level, those funds are not reaching children’s mental health services and disinvestment is taking place at local level. The Government would argue that there have been no reductions in funding; in essence, that is correct, as there have been no direct cuts from central government. However, we know that the NHS is underfunded and social care is in crisis. The cuts to CAMHS budgets are the result of reduced funding to the NHS and local authorities, which then make cuts to local services and staffing levels. The impact of all this, as so graphically highlighted by a number of noble Lords, is that children and young people and their parents are unable to access services when they most need them.

In January this year, the Government announced that they would be publishing a Green Paper on children and young people’s mental health. Will the Minister give us an indication of when this will be published? I understand that the Green Paper will contain new proposals for improving services across the system and increasing the focus on preventive activity across all delivery partners. I warmly welcome this, but with a note of caution.

I have four questions for the Minister. First, will he assure us that the proposals will be adequately funded? Secondly, as the Government will not interfere with local decision-making or ring-fence money, how can he assure us that any national funding is used as intended by the local commissioning groups? Thirdly, I welcome the focus on preventive activity across all delivery partners—education, health, social care and the voluntary sector—which I believe is a crucial part of the solution to developing a good quality of care, a point echoed by the noble Baroness, Lady Chisholm. Are the Government proposing to issue guidance that will direct these partners to develop new ways of delivering children and young people’s mental health services that are collaborative and integrated? They should look at innovation, given the point raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, around technology—I think that the noble Baroness, Lady Fall, mentioned that, too.

Fourthly, any new proposals must involve service users. Will the Minister assure us, in the spirit of the report “There for you”, that the people who use services and their families are placed firmly at the centre of any plans in a meaningful, not tokenistic, way, in order to ensure that their voices are listened to, heard and acted on, especially those very vulnerable young people whom my noble friend Lord Cashman highlighted in his speech? It is vital that we build a sustainable future for children and young people’s mental health services. To do anything less risks failing an entire generation of children and young people.