Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Miriam Cates and Baroness Laing of Elderslie

Tuesday 5th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[Miriam Cates (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Con)]

My constituent Dan Archer runs the highly successful Visiting Angels care agency, which has an annual staff turnover rate of just 13%, compared with an industry average of 60%. The secret to his success is very straightforward: paying decent wages, investing in training, valuing staff and prioritising client satisfaction. As a consequence, an enormous amount of money is saved on recruitment and invested into training and retention instead. Would the Minister meet my constituent to learn more about the success of Visiting Angels and how it can be shared more widely to help solve the shortage of workers in the care sector?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

Order. Can Members please cut their questions in half? Otherwise, I will have to stop this questions session and people will not get a chance at all.

Mental Health Treatment and Support

Debate between Miriam Cates and Baroness Laing of Elderslie

Wednesday 7th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Miriam Cates (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Con)]

It is well reported that mental health difficulties have become both more prevalent and more talked about in recent years. Lockdown has certainly had a detrimental impact on the mental health of the nation, which is completely unsurprising. Isolation and loneliness are significant contributors to poor mental health. We have also had the economic consequences of inflation putting pressure on people’s personal finances, and the consequences of the NHS backlogs that have been referred to in this debate, but I particularly want to focus on children’s mental health.

As has already been mentioned by other hon. Members, we have had a rise in diagnosable mental health conditions among children since before lockdown. We have gone from about one in nine children having potentially diagnosable mental health conditions to one in six. I am sure we have all had cases in our constituencies—tragic stories of children who no longer leave home because they are too anxious, who are not able to go to school. We have seen a rise in the number of ghost children, many of whom are not turning up at school because of anxiety and mental health issues.

The Opposition have talked a lot about all the money that needs to be spent. The Government are spending money, boosting mental health spending by at least £2.3 billion by 2024. The motion calls for improved outcomes for people with mental health needs. We all want that, but prevention is better than cure, and it is simply not sufficient to call for ever more money to expand remedial capacity without addressing the root cause of the problem. It is a bit like having a leaky roof and calling for ever larger buckets to catch the drips: we need to fix the roof. Many will cite poverty, poor housing and not enough youth services as the causes. All are contributing factors, I have no doubt, but there are two less well understood, less talked about, and potentially more significant factors contributing to poor child mental health.

The first, which has been mentioned already, is the clear correlation between the rise of smartphones and social media and deteriorating mental health in young people. The extent of online harms cannot be overstated. My right hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Vicky Ford) mentioned pornography. Violent pornography is now routinely encountered by children on the internet, with 1.3 million visits a month by UK children to adult sites. There is also eating disorder and suicide content—again, as my right hon. Friend so articulately mentioned —and child sexual abuse material and exploitation. Anxiety issues are compounded by social media platforms. Children stay up all night waiting for likes on their social media profiles. There is clearly a relationship between more time spent on screens and less outdoor activity, which is another good indicator for poor mental health.

There seems to be a relationship between children spending more hours on social media and worse mental health. The Online Safety Bill, which is going through the other place at the moment, will deal with some of those issues, but I urge Ministers to encourage their colleagues in Government to accept some of the amendments that their lordships have tabled to strengthen the age verification provisions, to make it absolutely watertight that children cannot access some of the worst of those harms. However, we urgently need some proper research into whether it is safe for teens to have smartphones or to go on social media at all. Some have said that their smartphones are as addictive as cigarettes—that they are the opiate trade of the 21st century. I applaud the campaign group UsforThem and its “Safe Screens for Teens” campaign, which is calling for proper research into the health impact of smartphones on teens and whether, like tobacco and alcohol, it is necessary for there to be a legal age limit for accessing some of these platforms, or indeed having a smartphone at all.

A second, under-discussed contributing factor to poor child mental health is family breakdown. We are not talking about a small number of children affected: the UK has the highest rate of family breakdown in the OECD and in the western world. Some 44% of our children will not spend their childhood living with both of their biological parents. There is not enough recent data on this issue, but Office for National Statistics studies from 2010 suggest that back then, 3 million children did not live with their father and 1 million had no meaningful contact with their father. Given those figures, a mental health crisis among children and young people is absolutely no surprise.

Of course, family breakdown leads to other factors that contribute to poor mental health, such as poverty and low income. Some 80% of single-parent households are on universal credit, I think. That is no surprise at all, as there is only one adult in the house to fulfil all the roles and responsibilities of a parent. It puts pressure on housing costs, as one adult is supporting the household—of course there are going to be pressures on housing costs. Single parents are absolute heroes, and I take my hat off to them. Being a parent is an incredibly difficult job when there are two adults in the house. Single parents are heroes, but few would say that it is an ideal situation.

Family breakdown is far worse for the poor, which of course is closely linked to marriage rates. Married relationships are statistically less likely to break down than cohabiting ones, and marriage rates have remained very high in high-income groups, but have collapsed in low-income groups.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

Order. The hon. Lady has exceeded her time.

Doncaster Sheffield Airport

Debate between Miriam Cates and Baroness Laing of Elderslie

Monday 24th October 2022 Commons Chamber

[Miriam Cates (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Con)]

Thank you for being so generous with your time. As a fellow South Yorkshire MP, can I just say how grateful I am—I know that many of us in the House are—for the tireless work that you have done championing the airport?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

Order. The hon. Lady must say, “The work he has done.”

[Miriam Cates]

Apologies, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am grateful for the work that my hon. Friend has done, on behalf of the people of South Yorkshire, trying to rescue the airport. Does he believe that the local authorities and the combined authority have underestimated its economic and social value? If so, why does he think that is?

School-based Counselling Services

Debate between Miriam Cates and Baroness Laing of Elderslie

Tuesday 9th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Miriam Cates (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell), and I congratulate the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) on securing such an important debate.

Some time ago, before I was an MP, I was a secondary school science teacher. Like most busy secondary school teachers, I taught more than 300 pupils every week. As a teacher, I was very much focused on delivering the syllabus, ensuring that no one set fire to the classroom, and getting through all the teaching material on schedule. For a classroom teacher, it is important that students are ready to learn, and we often think about that in terms of, “Have they got the right pens and the right pencils? Have they brought their textbooks and homework?” However, it is, of course, also important that students are ready to learn emotionally and mentally.

It is not uncommon for teachers to have students turn up to the classroom who are just not in a fit state to learn. They might need to go to pastoral support or take some time out. Sometimes, the issues—a falling out between friends, an unexpectedly bad test result, or perhaps not getting into a sports team—resolve themselves on their own. But sometimes—often, in fact—the issues are deeper and harder to fix. I am thinking of things such as low self-esteem, a chaotic home life, abuse and, increasingly commonly, sexual exploitation over the internet.

Members on both sides of the House have made excellent speeches about how children are increasingly affected by mental health challenges that they desperately need help with and are not going to recover from on their own. Of course, some will have parents and extended family who are able to help, but many will not. It is not just important for their educational prospects that they have access to counselling in school; it is also important for their life chances in general that we address these problems early to stop them becoming chronic and affecting their whole lives. I do not want to repeat the many excellent remarks about the challenges our children are facing and how it is so important that all children have access to professional support.

Some schools are doing an amazing job already. Horizon Community College in Barnsley in my constituency has a wellbeing centre on site that is staffed by counsellors and people from the multi-agency support team, who support not only the children in the school but the whole community. That is a fantastic example, and we should share such good practice. But the truth is that many smaller schools do not have the resources to put in place something as innovative as that, so I fully support the campaign by my right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow to have a mental health professional available in every school.

Of course we need counsellors in schools, but it is very important that they are professional, that they follow guidance and that they can be trusted. In response to a survey by the Department for Education in 2017, only 47% of schools that employed counsellors said that their counsellors were registered with professional bodies, and one in seven said that their counsellors had no qualifications at all. We need to be very careful when we talk about counsellors in schools. They have a very influential role and they deal with vulnerable children, who often have mental health issues, as we know. They must fulfill that role responsibly and professionally, and they must follow guidance. I very much welcome the idea of community sector and third sector involvement, but we have to be very careful about the potential safeguarding issues if we do not follow the guidance and do not ensure professionalism.

I want to raise what I think is a very dangerous potential safeguarding issue that we are seeing in this area right now. Schools are inviting outside organisations in to provide counselling-type services and using their materials. Groups such as Stonewall and Mermaids are teaching what I think are dangerous and contested, extreme ideologies that do not have a basis in science to our children, and it is contrary to DFE guidance. We have groups such as the Allsorts Youth Project, which is teaching children that there are more than two sexes, and the Diversity Role Models group, which comes into school and provides workshops but tells children that their sex was assigned to them at birth. I have seen a video today by the Free to Be group telling teachers that they might drive children to suicide if they do not accept this ideology. And we have Stonewall wrongly interpreting the Equality Act 2010 in a way that erodes the sex-based rights particularly of girls, in a way that I think is very dangerous.

I know of children who have been counselled by adults in school that they would be happier if they changed their gender, and frighteningly, they are being told not to tell their parents and to keep this a secret. I know of schools where children are disciplined for complaining about children of the opposite sex being allowed to use their PE changing rooms. I think this pushing of an extreme ideology that does not have a basis in science and is highly contested is having terrible consequences, and teachers and pupils are afraid to speak out.

In 2009, 72 children were referred to the Tavistock’s gender identity service. In 2019, 2,364 children, of which two thirds were girls, were sent to the service. That is a 5,000% increase in the number of girls sent to the clinic in just 10 years. Many of them go on to be prescribed puberty blockers, and research suggests that 98% of those children are then given cross-sex hormones. These are children who will become infertile, sterile and have permanent loss of sexual function. How can 12, 13 or 14-year-olds consent to that? Many of these children have complex mental health issues. Many are autistic and many have difficult family backgrounds. Some are same-sex attracted, but are being told that they should change their gender. I am afraid that that is a consequence of a harm being done to our children as a direct result of this agenda being pushed in schools contrary to DFE guidance, which states:

“You should not reinforce harmful stereotypes, for instance by suggesting that children might be a different gender”.

The guidance goes on to talk about what material can and cannot be used.

I appreciate that the Minister has agreed to meet me to discuss this issue. Absolutely, we need counsellors to be available in school and we need more focus on wellbeing and emotional health. However, we must have a robust safeguarding process to ensure that the adults who go into schools and the materials they use are registered, approved and in line with DFE guidance, and that they are doing the best for our children, encouraging their wellbeing and not pushing their own agenda. I look forward to hearing from the Minister how he intends to ensure the guidance is followed and I appreciate his offer to meet me.

Royal Assent

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

I have to notify the House, in accordance with the Royal Assent Act 1967, that Her Majesty has signified her Royal Assent to the following Act:

Environment Act 2021.