Mental Health Taskforce

Philippa Whitford Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Alistair Burt]

I thank my right hon. Friend for the question and his own personal interest and work in this area. He, like me, has come across this conundrum: we talk from the Dispatch Box about more money going into mental health and then we go to areas and they say, “Well, it’s not happening here.” That has been a genuine reality that we need to do something about. We are being more hands-on towards clinical commissioning groups and having a more transparent system of examining their finances. In addition, guidance from the NHS says that it expects the increase in finance to the NHS to go proportionately to mental health services and we have now given specific commitments to the series of services announced by the Prime Minister and contained in these recommendations. In that way, we hope to make sure that the diversion of funds that has happened in the past will not happen in the future. Local areas will thus feel that they, too, must ensure that they have the share of the resource.

[Dr Philippa Whitford (Central Ayrshire) (SNP)]

All of us in the House welcome the strides made in changing the stigma around mental health, and people have been brave enough to speak out. In Scotland, we had the “See me” campaign, which was about seeing the person, not the condition.

Despite all the great talk, the money has often not gone to the services. Mental health trusts suffered a 2% cut in their budget between 2013 and 2015, and the number of psychiatric nurses decreased by 1.4%. The right hon. Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox) talked about money often ending up somewhere else, and we must avoid that. We need also to focus on children, because one in 10 of our children suffer from mental health problems between the ages of five and 16, and they are waiting a very long time to get help. We face the same challenge in Scotland. We measure it, we know how difficult it is to deal with, and we have managed to improve things by increasing staff and funding, but we also have a long road to walk.

One thing we are not doing enough is thinking about the whole spread of mental health support out into the community and about the way people work: people having insecure jobs; and people struggling to keep a roof over their head. Later, we are going to debate welfare reforms, and mental health issues arise from that. Three times as many poor children will have a mental health issue as children who are in a stable and well-financed family. Are we not going to try to join up our decisions and look at our other policy areas, in terms of how people work, how people are supported, and the mental health suffering that comes from the lack of that?

[Alistair Burt]

I thank the hon. Lady for her usual well-informed contribution to the debate on these issues, and for what she says about stigma and the general approach the Government have been taking. She is absolutely right about that. We have supported the Time to Change anti-stigma campaign, which has had some success, although we have to do more.

The hon. Lady is also right about children and wider cross-government work. On children and young people, for the first time we have a Minister in the Department for Education in England who has responsibilities for mental health, and the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Karen Bradley) is here to demonstrate that we take those cross-government responsibilities very seriously. One way in which we are going to manage the response to the taskforce is by having a cross-governmental team to make sure that Departments are joined up. Housing has something to do with this, as do education and work and pensions, as the hon. Lady said. We will make sure that that is done.

I should have said, but did not do so for reasons of time, that what has been said by the taskforce and what the Prime Minister has said is in addition to the £1.25 billion announced in March for the development of the child and adolescent mental health services in England and the £30 million a year eating disorder work, in order to recognise the increased pressures on children. As the hon. Lady rightly says, the more prevention work that can be done earlier, the better.