Health and Social Care Committee and Education Committee

Debate between Rachael Maskell and Luciana Berger

Thursday 10th May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Luciana Berger]

Officials in the Department of Health and Social Care told us that they expect that there will be some unintended consequences in seeking to achieve the four-week waiting time target if there are not adequate resources to make sure that the staff are in place to meet these young people’s needs. We know from the evidence we heard that right across the country there are already massive waiting times. In my own area, for example, 460 young people are waiting 24 weeks just for an assessment, let alone treatment. Unless we know that there will be more counsellors, psychiatrists and psycho- therapists to support these young people, there is no way that the Government will be able to introduce a four-week waiting time standard without raising thresholds for young people to access those services. That is a key recommendation of our report that we want the Government to address.

[Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

I, too, thank my hon. Friend for her statement and the work of the Committees in producing this really important report. Paragraph 81 goes to the heart of the matter:

“The Government should consider in its plans whether the role being delivered by qualified professionals rather than teachers should be its first course of action rather than the contingency plan.”

Does she agree that, owing to the scale, seriousness and severity of mental health challenges in young people, the Government should build a service based around school but available out of school and staffed by mental health professionals?

[Luciana Berger]

I thank my hon. Friend for her comments. A key concern we heard from education professionals in written evidence was how those designated mental health leads will be able to do their job. It was not clear from the evidence we heard from the Minister for School Standards that adequate resources will be in place to equip those teachers with the skills they need to do that role. That is why we recommend that there should be a specific payment and that it should be a senior role. That is also why we recommend that mental health professionals should not be a contingency; the first port of call should be those professionals in mental health, who have a fuller and wider training to be able to fulfil that role, rather than relying on teachers, who already have a massive burden.

Mental Health Provision: Children and Young People

Debate between Rachael Maskell and Luciana Berger

Tuesday 12th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Luciana Berger]

I thank the hon. Lady. I believe that we both share the concern about the challenge of recruitment within the mental health workforce. The Government themselves acknowledge that there is an issue by way of the fact that they have put forward a plan to recruit these extra thousands of mental health workers between now and 2021. In the context of our conversation this evening about young people in particular, it is particularly disheartening and dispiriting that the specific plan that was set out only a few months ago contains nothing to expand the number of child psychiatrists—something that we desperately need. In the north-west, we really struggle to fill vacancies for those posts.

[Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

My hon. Friend is making a great speech about the real crisis in child mental health. Does she agree that the Green Paper places more and more focus on teachers, as opposed to health professionals, providing mental health support? Teachers are already really stressed by the volume of work that they have to do and they are not trained as medical professionals, so should that emphasis change?

[Luciana Berger]

I thank my hon. Friend for that important contribution. Another question that I hope the Minister will answer is how we can properly equip and train teachers to contend with the responsibility that they will be given if the plan set out in the Green Paper goes ahead. At the same time, the Department for Education is piling extra pressure on students with more testing. There are fewer teaching staff, which adds to the pressure on the remaining staff, and class sizes are larger. Cuts have been made to mentors, pastoral care and counselling. There has been a 13% reduction in the number of educational psychologists in our schools. The Royal College of Nursing points out that the number of school nurses has dropped by 16%, while the number of school-age pupils has gone up by 450,000. Young people face bullying, online threats, dysmorphic body image and advertising in a way that no previous generation has done.

Like many hon. Members, I am upset, appalled and outraged every week by the heartbreaking cases that constituents and their families raise with me in person or via email. Many Members in this House will recall the case in August of 17-year-old Girl X. She was restrained more than 100 times in a place that was not fit for her care, and she was left without a secure bed. The UK’s most senior family court judge, Sir James Munby, raised her case and warned us that we would have “blood on our hands” if this suicidal and vulnerable young woman did not get the treatment that she needed. But why was his continued intervention needed?

The case of Jack was brought to me this weekend. Jack is eight years old, and he has autistic spectrum disorder. He is in a severe state of anxiety and distress, and he has spent the last eight weeks on a ward in Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. He has had no specialist support from CAMHS and no specialist in-patient bed. He is getting more ill, and his family are, in the words of his mum Kerry, “in complete crisis.”

Just this afternoon, I heard about the case of Martha, who is 15 and has a history of self-harm. She has been admitted to A&E twice after taking an overdose. From a referral in June, Martha is still waiting to see a mental health professional. In the cases that I have described and thousands like them, every day counts, but young people are waiting weeks and months for treatment while their conditions worsen and their families are left distraught.

I do not believe that the Green Paper does anything for young people such as Jack, Martha or Girl X, or for thousands of other young people, whose lives should be filled with optimism and wonder as they look to a future laden with promise. I am concerned that instead, they are going to face years of torment, anguish and pain, made worse by the fact that so much of it is preventable. The majority of adults with diagnosable mental health conditions will have developed them under the age of 18. The life chances of thousands are being blighted. We are leaving a generation in pain; they are being let down because the care is not there.

Ultimately—I agree with the point made by the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk) —what is missing is the proper focus on prevention. How can we prevent mental ill health and keep our children well? We know that the first 1,001 days of a child’s life determine their life chances and life outcome, and that is why the previous Labour Government invested millions in Sure Start and children’s centres. We need to remove the factors that create mental ill health in the first place: neglect, childhood trauma, domestic abuse, bullying, insecure housing and poverty. Unfortunately, the Green Paper does not address those issues. Indeed, the words Sure Start, deprivation, homelessness and inequality do not appear in the Green Paper even once.

We do not need to be economists to understand that it is far more expensive to run a service that is based on crisis than a service that is based on prevention, not just in human terms, but in terms of taxpayers’ cash. What a wasted opportunity. I sincerely hope that the consultation on the Green Paper will be meaningful, that Ministers will listen to the voices of young people and experts across the country who are crying out for change, and that we will see some action.

In conclusion, will the Minister tell the House—I have asked this question, but let me reiterate it—whether the pilot, which I know is only a pilot, will introduce a four-week waiting target for assessment or for treatment? The Green Paper guarantees funding only for the period of the spending review, so what guarantees can the Minister offer us for maintaining funding after the initial three years are up? What will happen then? How will the lucky fifth of schools be selected for the first wave of support? How will her Government address the aim of real parity of esteem between mental and physical health? Reading the Green Paper, it seems to enshrine imparity by supporting only 20% of children over the next six years. Finally, is she convinced that this really is the best her Government can do for the greatest asset that we possess—our young people, who are our nation’s future?