Home Affairs and Justice

Pat McFadden Excerpts

Thursday 10th May 2012 Commons Chamber

[Andrea Leadsom]

I am very grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his intervention. I am aware of that campaign and many others, too. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children has an excellent programme called “All babies count”, which is concerned about the mental health of babies. After all, that is a slightly obscure topic until one gets into it. Adult mental health has always been something of a Cinderella service for our NHS and when infant mental health is mentioned, it usually merely prompts the question, “What’s all that about?”

Our society has taken great care to develop an NHS that every man, woman and child in this country values and wishes to preserve, yet it is all about health and focuses on mental health far too little and too late. At the moment, when someone conceives, they are allocated a midwifery team and introduced to the health visiting team. If they get so far with problems, they might be introduced to the social work team. Unfortunately, there is great fear among parents of being introduced to the social work team because they fear that their baby might be taken away. They are therefore concerned about seeking help. Parents have a midwife and health visitor, who often do a fabulous job for the physical health of mum and baby while the mum is pregnant and when the baby is very young. When mum is not bonding well with her baby—she might be terribly post-natally depressed, as one in 10 women suffer from post-natal depression, but she might not know that she is suffering from it—the midwife and/or the health visitor might spot it but, at the moment, there is not much they can do. The bar is set so high for referrals to child and adolescent mental health services that someone almost needs to be at a crisis level before they can be referred for psychotherapeutic support for that earliest relationship. That is quite simply wrong.

When we talk about children being school-ready, we mean in the sense of their responding to their own name, understanding danger and understanding the word no, but those should not even be the questions that are asked. When parents are firmly bonded to their baby, they will take the trouble to teach their child about danger and to give their child breakfast. We are always firefighting. We should accept that everything we do for a baby from the moment of conception until they reach the age of two is developmental and that pretty much everything we do for them after they are two is about trying to put right damage that has already been done.

[Mr Pat McFadden (Wolverhampton South East) (Lab)]

I am very interested in what the hon. Lady is saying. Is she familiar with the family nurse partnership programme that was introduced in this country a few years ago? The programme was about trying to avoid some of the dangers and consequences that she is talking about. The idea was not to have the social services involved in trying to clear up and deal with problems after they had developed, but to give support to young, first-time mothers—helping them with parenting skills, the bonding that is needed, feeding, playing and all the nurturing that goes into preventing some of the problems the hon. Lady has mentioned from developing. Does she agree that such programmes have an important role to play?

[Andrea Leadsom]

Yes. I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his comments and I am very aware of the programme he mentions. There are many other programmes, and they all have a valid role to play. There is no one-size-fits-all approach. Indeed, I want to talk about a charity that I have been involved with for 12 years now—the Oxford Parent Infant Project, which has seven satellites around Oxfordshire. It works with families and their babies to improve the quality of attachment. OXPIP has had astonishing results over those 12 years. In 2009, I gave up my role as the chairman of OXPIP to fight my general election campaign, but I always intended that if I was fortunate enough to be elected to Parliament, I would work to build a Northamptonshire Parent Infant Partnership, which I have now done. That partnership was launched six months ago and we are trying to build a service that, like OXPIP, provides psychotherapeutic support for families who are struggling to bond with their babies.

What I really want is for this approach to be established through children’s centres. We do not need more overheads or more buildings. I am a co-chair of the all-party group on Sure Start children’s centres and it has become apparent from our recent inquiry into the impact of the un-ring-fencing of the early intervention grant that it is not the case that children’s centres are closing—far from it. Directors of children’s services are very committed to support for the youngest. What I have found astonishing from that inquiry is the fact that there is no common shared understanding of best practice in children’s centres. To say that they are about getting children school-ready is to miss the point completely. School-readiness should be a result of the earliest relationship if it is sound and solid. That is where we need to focus our efforts.

I would like to see parent-infant partnerships working in every local authority in conjunction with the children’s centres and as part of those teams—working with health visitors, midwives and social workers as a point of referral. Midwives and social workers have a very full role and enormous lists of clients or patients to see. Some midwives look after up to 600 families and it is ridiculous to assume that they can see mum and sort out whether she has a safe and secure relationship with her baby as well as treat those mothers and babies who do not have such a relationship. That simply is not going to happen. Even the Government’s excellent efforts to produce far more health visitors will not provide a complete solution to this problem. Health visitors need somewhere to refer cases—a specialist team such as a parent-infant partnership that can provide the psychotherapeutic support for that mother and baby, or father and baby or adoptive parents and baby to help them to form that early bond.

A week tomorrow, the Northamptonshire Parent Infant Project is having a one-day conference in my constituency to talk about the incredible work that can be done through early-years intervention to change our society for the better. This is not just about human happiness, although that is what drives me—the potential for all those babies to be so much better—but about the potential financial savings for our society. If we had one generation in which the vast majority of babies were securely attached by the age of five, instead of 40% not being securely attached by that age, we would radically reduce the cost to our mental health services, our prison services, our police and our social services, which are currently trying to pick up the pieces of failed early attachment.

At the conference, we will be making the case that early-years intervention and spending money in the very earliest years when babies are under two is a really good way to save money much further down the line. Research from the States suggests that a dollar spent when a baby is under two saves $19 further down the line. There is a huge argument for looking seriously at that type of service, from both a financial and a moral point of view.