Children’s Mental Health

Marco Longhi Excerpts

Tuesday 8th February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Marco Longhi (Dudley North) (Con)]

I thank the hon. Member for Tooting (Dr Allin-Khan) for securing this debate. The subject is close to my heart. While we know that the most valuable time in a human’s development is during childhood, and that by setting the right foundations early in life, we can prevent and reduce issues that may occur as a person grows through to adulthood, we also know that mental health, just like physical health, can change at any point in our lives. We need to be bolder about how we tackle the advent of social media and the massively corrosive impact it has had, not just on young people, but on so many people across the age ranges—it does not discriminate.

Naturally, it is most welcome that this Government are acting on the early years healthy development review by asking all local authorities to publish a “Start for Life” offer for parents, backed up with a £500 million package for families. Staff and professionals in our local authorities, education settings, charities and health and community organisations work tirelessly to help our children and families. I thank them from the bottom of my heart for what they do. Yes, the pandemic has made that challenge all the harder, but they have tried their best in these unprecedented times.

The pandemic has also made things harder for parents and carers of children, whether they are living in homes not suited to the number of people in them all day, every day during lockdown, or struggling to balance working from home with caring responsibilities and home schooling. Families need to know that they are supported, and it needs to be as easy as possible for them to know where to get support for their children.

Parents want what is best for their children, and finding support when needed can often be difficult. Family hubs will provide one central point of contact from conception until the day that the child legally becomes an adult, providing a more holistic approach that combines virtual access with face-to-face support. As amazing as technology is in connecting us, we still face a barrier of digital exclusion in some areas of our communities, and nothing truly replaces the benefits that come with face-to-face support. We need to build more robust and resilient young people, who will grow into robust and resilient adults for the generations to come, and that must start as early as possible.

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[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Will Quince)]

I start by thanking all Members in all parts of the House for their valuable contributions to this important debate. It is, I hope, one of those debates in which all of us fundamentally want the same thing, and I think we have heard an awful lot of agreement across the House today. In Children’s Mental Health Week, it is important that we raise awareness of this important issue. Like the hon. Member for Tooting (Dr Allin-Khan), I congratulate and thank Place2Be for all the work it does to raise awareness nationally. It is right that we have a spotlight on children and young people’s mental health, and I join hon. Members in thanking all those who work in mental health services up and down our country.

As many Members rightly pointed out, the pandemic has proved to be hugely challenging for children and young children, but they have shown incredible resilience in the most difficult circumstances. The pandemic has been difficult for many families. We all know this and many examples have been cited today, but we should not overlook the impact on children from not being able to attend school or go to after-school clubs, from not being able to see friends and family or play the sport they love, and from being stuck at home with their parents, as my children regularly said. There was disruption to their lives, and I thank teachers and support staff throughout the country for helping us to reopen schools and get children where we know it is best for them to be and they wanted to be. Whenever I visit a school, I ask about mental health and mental wellbeing. Immediately before this debate, I was in Trinity Church of England School in London, alongside Instagram and “Love Island” star Dr Alex George, to meet the mental health support team. They are doing incredible work, which I want to see rolled out further and faster; I will cover that in more detail later.

As Minister for Children and Families, I have a cross-Government role, but I hope the House understands that my focus today is on education. I will try to answer as many of the points raised by colleagues on both sides of the House as possible, but first—perhaps unusually for an Opposition day debate—I want to say how much I welcome the Opposition raising this subject and pushing the Government to go further and faster. As Children’s Minister, let me say that one child or young person waiting too long for mental health support is one child too many. The health, both mental and physical, of children and young people is something that I and this Government take incredibly seriously. Are we doing a lot already? Yes. Can we do more? Yes, and we must. Our children and young people deserve nothing less.

[Marco Longhi]

Does the Minister agree that mental health is not something we can consider under one umbrella? In my Dudley constituency, Priory Park boxing club is doing fantastic work with children who are excluded from school. It is a great place not only for their physical wellbeing but for their mental health. The new hubs need to be integrated with other stakeholders in the community.

[Will Quince]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I will come on to talk about family hubs and the role that they can rightly play.

I am no expert in this field, but I listen closely to those who are and I split mental health and mental wellbeing into three categories: resilience, identification and intervention, and specialist support. On the first, what can we do to help children and young people to be more resilient? We do that through our relationships, sex and health education, which is now compulsory between five and 16 years old, through our behaviour in schools guidance, through the sports and extracurricular activities that we have in schools throughout our country, and through things like forest schools, which have been mentioned and which are absolutely brilliant.

How can we identify emerging problems sooner and provide that all-important support? We can do that through measures such as mental health lead training and rolling out mental health support teams across the country. For access to specialist mental health support, we have the NHS long-term plan and additional investment of £2.3 billion a year by 2023-24, allowing at least an additional 345,000 children and young people to access NHS-funded mental health support, which of course comes under the Department of Health and Social Care.