Mental Health and Unemployment

Debate between Mark Harper and Paul Burstow

Tuesday 24th February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Harper]

My hon. Friend makes a good point about fluctuating conditions in the context of assessments. One change in the work capability assessment has been a recognition that fluctuating conditions, including in the mental health space, must be taken into account. Claimants should be asked questions not just about their experience on that day, but about what a typical day looks like and the extent to which their condition fluctuates.

A number of Members, including the right hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam who opened the debate, referred to how my Department and the Department of Health are working together on improving people’s employment and health prospects. He referred to the pilots that we are undertaking. There are four broad pilots, one looking at the individual placement and support model, one looking at whether peer-led group work employment intervention can improve outcomes, another investigating whether a telephone support model is effective, and an online service pilot, which was one of the recommendations from the RAND study that he mentioned. Those pilots, as he knows, have started and are moving into the next phase, which involves a larger set of pilots.

One thing that we are keen to do, which is frustrating because it means that pilots take longer, is to get robust evidence bases for those pilots. As the shadow Minister said, if one wants to roll them out on a significant scale, with my Department and the Department of Health working together, and a substantial amount of money is to be invested, a good evidence base is needed to be clear about what the outcomes will be. It is important that there are sufficient numbers of individuals going through those pilots for a robust evidence base to be developed, rather than lots of qualitative data and anecdotal evidence suggesting that they were successful.

[Paul Burstow]

I agree that we need a robust evidence base on which the roll-out takes place, but individual placement and support has already been the subject of randomised controlled trials. There is a very good evidence base that should be used to roll it out.

[Mr Harper]

The right hon. Gentleman is right about that. That is why the access to psychological therapies work is already under way and, as I said, is being rolled out further. One of the issues is how well the pilots can be scaled, given that some pilots require skilled mental health professionals, of whom there are a limited number—by which I do not mean a small number, but finite capacity—looking at models which enable us to scale the pilots up more quickly. We want to make sure that we have a good evidence base for pilots that look promising.

The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) referred to some very specific experiences in Northern Ireland. It is worth putting on the record—he knows this because we have had this conversation before—that quite a lot of welfare and health services are devolved to the Northern Ireland Executive. It is right for him to raise his constituency experience here in the House, but the delivery of those services is not under my control or that of my colleagues in the Department of Health. Those services are under the control of the Northern Ireland Executive. I will be meeting the Minister in due course as we are keen for our experiences to inform how the Northern Ireland Executive rolls out those services, and vice versa. If we can learn from each other, we are happy to do so.