Children’s Mental Health

Peter Dowd Excerpts

Tuesday 8th February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Peter Dowd (Bootle) (Lab)]

Today’s Opposition debate on children’s mental health is timely, as children have been deprived of seeing their friends, unable to attend school and even told that they cannot hug their grandparents. Those circumstances have all fed into a wave of anxiety, and we have seen record numbers of children seeking mental health services during this pandemic. Current modelling by the Centre for Mental Health suggests that 1.5 million children and young people in England will need either new or additional mental health support as a result of the pandemic. The Health and Social Care Committee notes that 60% of young people with a mental disorder are not able to access mental health support. It also warned that without urgent action, mental health services are likely to slip backwards as a result of additional demand and the scale of unmet need prior to the pandemic.

Many of us, from across this House, have spent much of the past decade warning of the detrimental impact that cuts to local government budgets and Sure Start centres would have on mental health support for our young people, and far too often those warnings fell on deaf ears. A study by the Children’s Commissioner for England in 2019 found that about 60% of local authority areas have seen a real-terms fall in spending on low-level mental health services for children. We know that deprivation and economic inequality are strongly predictive of children and young people’s wellbeing.

My local council is one of the most deprived in the country and it is reporting that about 20% of new parents are suffering with mental health issues. Our local community cannot afford to wait, which is why Sefton Council and Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust’s mental health team have created a new, groundbreaking early intervention programme to support parents and their babies, in an endeavour to break the cycle. In 2018, local health and social care professionals Dr Lisa Marsland Hall and Majella Maguire developed a bespoke specialist mental health service from work undertaken in Knowsley borough and in 2020 they were able to launch a 12-month pilot for a Sefton Building Attachments and Bonds Service—BABS. That has now been rolled out for a longer period of time. I will pass on the information to the Minister, because he may well use it, as it is an excellent service.

The Early Intervention Foundation has found that a failure to intervene early to avoid preventable mental health difficulties costs the NHS £3.7 billion per year, and a further £2.7 billion in relation to Department for Work and Pensions costs. The 10-year long-term plan is just that—it is over 10 years. We really do not have 10 years to sort this problem out for our children.