Mental Health Education in Schools

Debate between Robert Halfon and James Morris

Monday 6th November 2017 Westminster Hall

[James Morris]

I definitely agree with my right hon. Friend on that. As I said, the family is the crucible. The issue is often very complex, and the relationship between the family and the school is a critical part of what we are discussing because, again, families can be a place where therapy is very effective, and can be a very effective way of helping the child and making them resilient, so I very much agree with my right hon. Friend’s point.

[Robert Halfon]

Could I add just one qualification? Children with mental health difficulties may be experiencing significant family breakdown and may not be able to have the family involved, and therefore the school is literally the one place that can really help the child. That goes back to what my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex (Sir Nicholas Soames) and others said about teacher training and a young person being able to go to someone in the school who can actually look after that student.

[James Morris]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that intervention. I totally agree: clearly, it will not be possible to involve the family in all cases. I have seen examples in my constituency, particularly in the primary school environment, in which headteachers and teachers have taken really interesting and creative decisions to replicate the family environment for children who have not been brought up in a stable family environment and have not entered primary school in a properly socialised way. They have replicated the family environment and tried to create those kinds of structures because they have been absent, so I completely agree with my right hon. Friend on that.

Other hon. Members have talked about CAMHS and I want to make a few comments about early intervention. If you look at the spectrum of what we are talking about, it could be argued that by the time children get to school any mental distress and difficulties they suffer from will have been baked in for many years. There has been a debate about early intervention and mental health for years; it is what I would call a policy no-brainer. Everybody agrees we should intervene earlier. Everybody agrees that in principle that is a good thing. Yet we are still debating about whether we are doing it sufficiently well and how it should be done. The truth is that we should shift resources to where the evidence points us.

The evidence points to the joint Green Paper on children’s health and education, and adolescent mental health, which other hon. Members have mentioned. The evidence suggests that interventions at an early age, sometimes pre-primary school, are the most effective interventions that we can make on a therapeutic level. From the evidence, it looks like working with children from birth to the age of two, working with families, and working with parents is the most effective intervention we can possibly make. I urge the Minister to be bold in terms of what we will do in that Green Paper. If we can do only one or two things from that Green Paper, we should focus on the really important one, which is shifting resources to genuinely effective early intervention based on evidence. Everything else we have talked about, such as mental health first aid and so on, has a role to play in this debate, but it will not solve the problem we are trying to confront. We will solve this problem by focusing a lot more resources in a laser-like way on early intervention—even before school. That is the critical part of this debate. The one bold move for the Government would be to focus their attention on that. Then we might be able to make significant progress.

Other hon. Members have mentioned CAMHS. If we were designing a child and adolescent mental health service today, we would not design it in the way it currently operates. We have had several reviews of CAMHS over the last decade. Other hon. Members have mentioned Future in Mind, the CQC has just done its review and there have been other reviews. We know that CAMHS is currently not fit for purpose. That is not to say that people working in CAMHS are not doing an excellent job in delivering the services they do, but we need a more integrated service. We need to move away from the tiering approach, which means we concentrate on tier four—that is children with the most severe mental illness. If we can get rid of this metaphor of tiering and focus on access to the appropriate level of care required by a child or young person in a place appropriate to them and deal with it across the spectrum, and integrate it with initiatives that are being taken in schools and the initiatives I have been talking about in relation to early intervention, we can make significant progress.

We have come a long way. People use the word “crisis,” which I am always very wary of using. It is not as if this crisis started today. The debate about children and young people’s mental health has been going on since about 1962 when Enoch Powell, then the Public Health Minister, made the decision that we would no longer put people in asylums but would move towards a community model. That was in 1961 or 1962. We are only now beginning to have a real debate about how we really tackle some of the underlying issues that we face in society in terms of the mental health of children and young people. We are much better at talking about it, but the debate actually is only just beginning and the Government have an opportunity to take some really bold steps, which would have a lasting legacy.

Trade Union Funding

Debate between Robert Halfon and James Morris

Wednesday 29th February 2012 Westminster Hall

[Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) on obtaining the debate. I am a member of Prospect trade union, and it does not give me any money for political campaigning, but I am publishing a pamphlet with Demos in the next couple of weeks, on relations between the unions and the Conservative party, and am deeply interested in the issue.

I want to make three points. First, I believe that it is wrong to lump all trade unions together. Secondly, as the hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Mr Doran) said, the Conservative party has a long history of co-operation with unions, on which we should build. Thirdly, we should do more to support the moderate majority of trade union members, most of whom are not political activists.

It is true that some trade unions get subsidies from the Government, as do banks. Yet many unions are, we should acknowledge, capitalist institutions, offering services that are intended directly to replace state provision, such as private health care. The market comparison website privatemedicalinsurance.co.uk shows that the Labour-affiliated union Unison has recently encouraged its members to join private health care schemes such as Medicash.

There are other examples. In 2001, The Daily Telegraph reported that 3.5 million trade unionists—more than half the TUC membership—now have some form of private health cover. That was 10 years ago. Since then the trade union movement has considerably professionalised and strengthened its private health care offer and other services, such as legal insurance. I suggest to my hon. Friends that we need to look at the reality of trade unions, not just the rhetoric of extreme militants.

Unions are still the largest membership associations in Britain. They are hugely more popular in membership terms than all the political parties combined.

[James Morris (Halesowen and Rowley Regis) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making important points. The Conservative party has had a positive relationship with the trade unions, but is not transparency of funding and understanding what trade unions do the most important thing?

[Robert Halfon]

Yes, I accept exactly what my hon. Friend says; I am all in favour of transparency. However, TUC membership now stands at 58 unions, representing 6.5 million people—more than the population of Scotland. Of those 58 unions, just 15 are affiliated to Labour, leaving 43 that are non-affiliated. In addition, there are huge numbers of small staff associations. My point is that those 6.5 million are a complex network of people, and the vast majority of them will be moderate Britons, in all sectors of the economy, from all walks of life, and not militant activists.

I am proud that our party has a long history of co-operation with the trade unions, beginning in 1867, before the Labour party even existed. It was the Conservative Prime Minister the Earl of Derby who first sought to legalise trade unions in 1867. He said in the House of Lords at the time that

“the voices of Manchester, of Birmingham, of Leeds, and of all the other important centres of manufacturing industry were absolutely unheard.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 22 July 1867; Vol. 188, c. 1775.]

He praised a trade union march in London, insisting to a hostile Liberal Opposition that the process was entirely legal.

I say these things not because I am not a proud Conservative: I come from the Thatcherite wing of the party, but even Mrs Thatcher was an active trade unionist. In 1950, she was elected president of the Dartford branch of one of the first organisations that she ever joined, the Conservative Trade Unionists. One of her first engagements as Leader of the Opposition was to address the CTU. She told them in 1975—it is well worth hearing this quotation—that

“the law should not only permit, but…it should assist, the trades unions to carry out their legitimate function of protecting their members.”

We all remember Mrs Thatcher for the wars against Arthur Scargill and so on, but she was supportive of trade union members and grass roots, although she was against militants. I am a firm Thatcherite on trade union reform.