Mental Health Taskforce

Luciana Berger Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Luciana Berger (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab/Co-op)]

(Urgent Question): To ask the Secretary of State for Health to make a statement on the Government’s response to the final report of the independent Mental Health Taskforce.

[The Minister for Community and Social Care (Alistair Burt)]

Achieving parity of esteem for mental and physical health remains a priority for this Government. I appreciate the hon. Lady’s raising of the urgent question this afternoon. We welcomed the independent Mental Health Taskforce launched by NHS England last year, with its remit to explore the variation in the availability of mental health services across England, to look at the outcomes for people who are using services, and to identify key priorities for improvement.

The taskforce, chaired by Paul Farmer, chief executive of Mind—I thank him, the vice-chair, Jacqui Dyer, and the whole team for the remarkable work they did—also considered ways of promoting positive mental health and wellbeing, ways of improving the physical health of people with mental health problems, and whether we are spending money and time on the right things.

The publication of the taskforce’s report earlier this month marked the first time a national strategy has been designed in partnership with all the health-related arm’s length bodies in order to deliver change across the system. This also demonstrated the remarkable way in which society, the NHS and this House now regard mental health and how it should be seen and approached.

This Government have made great strides in the way we think about and treat mental health in this country. We have given the NHS more money than ever before and are introducing access and waiting-time targets for the first time. We have made it clear that local NHS services must follow our lead by increasing the amount they spend on mental health and making sure that beds are always available. Despite those improvements, however—and I referred earlier to the way in which we view these matters—the taskforce pulled no punches. It produced a frank assessment of the state of current mental health care throughout the NHS, pointing out that one in four people would experience a mental health problem during their lifetime, and that the cost of mental ill health to the economy, the NHS and society was £105 billion a year.

We can all agree that the human and financial cost of inadequate care is unacceptable. The Department of Health therefore welcomes the report’s publication, and will work with NHS England and other partners to establish a plan for implementing its recommendations. To make those recommendations a reality, we will spend an extra £1 billion by 2020-21 to improve access to mental health services, so that people can receive the right care in the right place when they need it most. That will mean increasing the number of people completing talking therapies by nearly three quarters, from 468,000 to 800,000; more than doubling the number of pregnant women or new mothers receiving mental health support, from 12,000 to 42,000 a year; training about 1,700 new therapists; and helping 29,000 more people to find or stay in work through individual placement support and talking therapies.

I assure all Members that they will have ample opportunities to ask questions and debate issues as we work together to implement the taskforce’s recommendations.

[Luciana Berger]

The final report of the Mental Health Taskforce, commissioned by NHS England, provides a frank assessment of the state of mental health care, and describes a system that is “ruining” some people’s lives. It contains a number of recommendations which, if implemented in full, could make a significant difference to services that have had to contend with funding cuts and staff shortages at a time of rising demand, leaving too many vulnerable people without the right care and support.

It is extremely disappointing that the Opposition have had to compel the Minister to come to the Chamber today to ensure that Parliament can give the report and the Government’s response to it the attention and scrutiny that they deserve. It is all the more regrettable because the Prime Minister himself chose to announce their response to the media during last week’s recess—a courtesy which, had it not been for the urgent question, would still not have been afforded to the House. The Government’s apparent announcements included the announcement of a supposed “additional” £1 billion of investment by 2020, but a number of vital questions remain unanswered.

Will the Minister explain why the report was delayed and published during the recess? Did Ministers or No. 10 have a say in the timing, and, if so, does the Minister accept that such a level of interference on the part of Ministers raises questions about the independence of the report? Can the Minister confirm that no additional money will be allocated from the Treasury to fund what the Government have announced, and that it will be funded from the £8 billion that has already been set aside for the NHS to receive by 2020? Given that mental health is given just under 10% of the total NHS budget, surely mental health services would have expected to receive much of that additional money as part of the NHS settlement anyway. Can the Minister explain how the money can be expected to deliver the “transformation” in our mental health services that the taskforce says is urgently required?

Can the Minister also confirm that he is accepting all the recommendations relating to the NHS? Does he intend to respond to the other recommendations, and when can we expect that response? As the report makes clear, we do not solve the challenges of our nation’s mental health by means of the Department of Health.

On behalf of the many thousands of people who have been let down by the Government, who are desperate to see a change in the way in which we approach mental health, and who are owed a full explanation from the Government of their response to this damning report, I look forward to the Minister’s reply.

[Alistair Burt]

I thank the hon. Lady for her questions, which give me an opportunity to say still more about what we are doing in relation to mental health and how far it has come since 2010. For instance, she could have pointed out that 1,400 more people a day have access to mental health treatment than had access to it in that year, simply as a matter of comparison between what was done then and what is done now. However, it is absolutely right to make the essential point that there is more to be done—a view that we share—and that is what the report did.

The timing of the report was not up to the Government. It is an independent report, commissioned by the NHS from an independent taskforce, and the timing and the content were decided by the taskforce. I had the occasional meeting with Paul Farmer about it. I made sure to speak to him to say, “This is absolutely your report. Forget the guff in the papers about who wants what in the report and all that; this is yours and it’s got to be yours”—and it is absolutely clear that it was. The decision to publish it was theirs. The Prime Minister was able to respond, which was great, and that emphasises again the importance given to this issue now, as compared with times past.

On the finance, the important thing to note is that the Prime Minister announced in January how the £600 million in the spending review, which is included in the NHS bottom line until 2021, would be spent. That included the new money for perinatal mental health, crisis care, psychiatric liaison in A&E and the crisis care community work. What was said by the Prime Minister in relation to the taskforce report represents new money that will be available for the NHS and mental health by 2021. That will be £1 billion extra by 2021, with the additional number of people to be treated that I outlined.

I spoke to the taskforce after the issuing of the report. I do not particularly want just to produce a response to the taskforce report; I said that I would prefer a series of rolling responses, as it were, so that when we have responded to a recommendation and when we are moving on and delivering on it, I would say so. That will come in a variety of different forms, but will be related to what the taskforce has done. That may well involve announcements to Parliament, whether by written ministerial statements or other means. I did not want one big bang of a response, as it were, because the Prime Minister has already said that we will accept the recommendations, as they go with the grain of what the Government were going to do anyway. I wanted to give an indication that the report will not just sit on a shelf gathering dust. By making constant reference to it when we do something—saying, “This is a response to what the taskforce said we should be doing towards 2021”—it can get the stamp of support and recognition, which is important.

On the hon. Lady’s claim that thousands have been let down, again I would gently remind her that this Government were the first Government to set waiting times for physical and mental health—a chance missed by the hon. Lady’s Government when they were in office and set physical health waiting time limits. It is this Government who have actually made the commitment of £10 billion extra to the NHS, a commitment never made by her or her party. It is very easy for people to talk about new things in mental health when they do not have a budget or an economic team producing anything of any credibility, but this Government have got the responsibilities and are doing the work.

We are absolutely agreed that the state of mental health services cries out for more to be done; we have said that, and that is what we are doing. The direction of travel and the physical delivery is happening on a day-by-day basis. We will do more; we will continue to work together to do more, and I welcome the hon. Lady and her team’s very regular pressure on me and my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State to continue to do more. We will meet that challenge—and we are meeting it in a way that no Government have ever met it before.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alistair Burt]

I am happy to do so, and I welcome my hon. Friend’s question. As I indicated earlier, something that has perplexed me since I have been in this role is the variation in practice in different places. It has never been easier to transfer information by electronic means and make people aware of best practice, but it is still difficult to move things around. We need to make sure that there is a website—a clearing house—for ideas in such areas.

[Luciana Berger]

It already exists in the Positive Practice collaborative.

[Alistair Burt]

Absolutely. We need to make sure that we have proper ways to access all the different ideas. A lot of work has gone into this, and we need to make sure that it is easy to access different ideas. There is a lot going on, and a lot can be done in relation to spreading best practice.