Children in Need: Adulthood

Paul Farrelly Excerpts

Thursday 6th September 2018 Westminster Hall

[Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Lab)]

I also congratulate the Children’s Society on its great work and my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe) on securing the debate so quickly after the summer recess. I will focus on an issue affecting young adults in need that crops up regularly in my area of north Staffordshire, where, shamefully, after years and years, no resolution is in sight.

For any family that has to go through them, anorexia, bulimia or other eating disorders are one of the most devastating illnesses that can affect the physical and mental health of children as they grow up. Often triggered by other traumatic life events or the stress of coping with adolescence, the suffering can be immense. Neither that suffering nor their vulnerability suddenly stops when children reach the magic age of 18, but in my immediate area—Newcastle-under-Lyme, Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire Moorlands—the commissioning of specialist support and treatment most certainly does.

North Staffordshire has an in-patient facility—the Darwin Centre in Penkhull in Stoke—for children needing treatment for mental health issues, including acute eating disorders. It is run by the excellently led North Staffordshire Combined Healthcare NHS Trust. In total, the annual budget for the North Staffordshire and Stoke clinical commissioning groups to address children and young people’s eating disorders is about £250,000, with more than £300,000 more spent in the rest of the county. For adults, however, the figure is precisely zero; no specialist adult eating disorder services are commissioned by the two CCGs. Instead, after children reach 18—teenagers still—they fall off a cliff and essentially have to rely on the good will of overstretched general adult mental health teams to respond to their needs. It is a scandalous situation that should not be allowed to continue. The CCGs, and their overlord, NHS England, need to act without delay.

Someone in my area needing specialist treatment as they leave school has to leave the area to obtain it, but not everyone is fortunate enough to go to a college or university in a place where the authorities treat such conditions with the seriousness that they deserve. It is especially sickening in my area because a few postcodes away, in other parts of Staffordshire, adults get treatment. There is an in-patient unit in Stafford, the Kinver Centre, run by the recently established Midlands Partnership NHS Foundation Trust. It can admit people from all over the country—not just the county—but not from North Staffordshire or Stoke, as our two CCGs provide no funding. However, the county’s other four CCGs certainly do. Their budgets for treating adult eating disorders is more than £400,000 a year, compared with nothing for constituents and families in my area, and nothing for local children in need as they reach adulthood.

The situation is made even more anomalous as, since last year, the county’s six CCGs have been run by the same accountable officer, Marcus Warnes, whom I am seeing tomorrow, so this is a timely debate. The latest information I cite comes from a response from those CCGs last month after I yet again raised the issue. I do not know how other hon. Members are served by their local health commissioners, but in Staffordshire all letters, including from MPs, are shipped off to a remote correspondence centre in Rugeley—the grandly titled Midlands and Lancashire Commissioning Support Unit— which gives itself 40 days to reply. I must admit that the response on this issue, which particularly affects young adults, came a little quicker, but it was signed, illegibly, on behalf of Marcus Warnes, so I do not even know if he read it or not. After confirming the zero figures for the Stoke and North Staffordshire CCGs, in comparison with the bountiful parts of the county, the reply ended:

“I hope that we have addressed your concerns. However, if there are any outstanding issues, please do not hesitate to contact the Patient Services Team.”

That is how they deal with Members of Parliament, so I hate to think how patients and vulnerable members of the public are treated. Frankly, not only are these people not on the case, but I sometimes think that they are not really on the same planet as the rest of us.

I appreciate that the Minister may well consider health commissioning out of his jurisdiction, but it is also certainly very much to do with children and families. In the interests of joined-up care and provision for vulnerable young adults, he should be aware of anomalies like this, as indeed should everyone in my area who needs such vital specialist services. Pressure really needs to be put—from all directions—on our local health commissioners to correct this situation, not least by members of those groups themselves, so that they actually serve the people they are supposed to represent.