Oral Answers to Questions

Roberta Blackman-Woods Excerpts

Tuesday 14th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

I strongly agree with my hon. Friend’s implication that there has in effect been institutionalised discrimination against patients with mental health conditions compared with those with physical health conditions. While I pay tribute to the previous Government for introducing waiting times for patients with physical conditions, it is only now—we have had to wait several years—that we have started to introduce the same entitlements for mental health care patients. For instance, if a child has a first episode of psychosis, from next year there will be the guarantee that the vast majority of them will be seen in a couple of weeks, just as if someone was diagnosed and referred with cancer, and someone suffering from depression will be referred to talking therapies and will receive those talking therapies within six weeks, and 18 weeks at the maximum. That is a big step in the right direction.

[Roberta Blackman-Woods (City of Durham) (Lab)]

T7. I can see why the Deputy Prime Minister might not be chasing the student vote in 2015 in quite the way he did in the last election, so will he tell the House what he is doing to encourage students to register and vote?

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

It is worth remembering what is happening right now. Despite all the controversy of the recent changes, more young students are applying to go to university than ever before, there is a higher rate of students from disadvantaged backgrounds going to university than ever before, and a higher proportion of youngsters from black and minority ethnic backgrounds are going to university than ever before, confounding all the predictions that the hon. Lady’s party made at the time of the change. I suspect that the effects of individual voter registration will confound all its predictions as well.