Mental Health Support

Sonia Kumar Excerpts

Thursday 10th October 2024 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Andrew Gwynne)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd, and it is also a pleasure to respond to this debate on World Mental Health Day. I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Sojan Joseph) for securing the debate and for drawing on his long-standing experience of working in mental health care to raise so many important points in the debate. As several others have, including the shadow Minister, I thank everybody who works in the field of mental health, whether as a mental health practitioner or as one of the very many volunteers who give up their time freely to help people who are facing particular difficulties in their lives.

I am responding to this debate on behalf of Baroness Merron, the Minister with responsibility for mental health, so apologies if I do not answer everybody’s questions. I have taken copious notes and am sure that the powers that be sitting behind me have taken even more. If I do not answer all the points raised, Members can expect to receive something from the relevant Minister in due course.

It has been a great debate. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan) and the hon. Members for Epsom and Ewell (Helen Maguire) and for Hinckley and Bosworth (Dr Evans). The latter made a really important point about the interrelationship between education and health in the whole sphere of special educational needs, autism and so on. I reassure him and others who made that point that the beauty of being part of a mission-led Government that has five missions—one is the health mission and another is the opportunities mission—is that it allows Ministers the opportunity to look at things in the round and break out of departmental silos. I assure him that on these issues I am having bilateral meetings with counterparts in the Department for Education about how we drive forward key elements of the health mission, and also about the role that the Department of Health and Social Care can play in achieving the Government’s opportunities mission. That work is taking place at departmental level.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead Central and Whickham (Mark Ferguson) for his contribution, and the hon. Member for Leicester South (Shockat Adam), who is not in his place but made some really important points, particularly about the impact of the Mental Health Act on black and minority ethnic groups. I, and the Government, think it is shameful that under the existing Mental Health Act black people are three and a half times more likely to be detained than white people and eight times more likely to be placed on a community treatment order. Our mental health Bill will give patients greater choice and autonomy and enhanced rights and support, and we will ensure that it is designed to be respectful in terms of treatment with the aim of eradicating inequalities. I put that on the record because the hon. Member for Leicester South made an important point.

I thank my hon. Friends the Members for Gravesham (Dr Sullivan) and for York Central (Rachael Maskell). My hon. Friend the Member for Hastings and Rye (Helena Dollimore) made a powerful contribution about Phoebe and about her ICB—I hope the ICB has listened. My hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tristan Osborne) made a contribution, as did my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Dr Opher). I reiterate to him that of course the arts have a powerful role to play in the health and wellbeing of the individual. I was fortunate last Friday to see the Manchester Camerata, one of the great orchestras in my home city, at the Gorton Monastery in my constituency, which is now a health and wellbeing hub. As well as understanding the work that it does, I also learned a lot more about social prescribing and about its powerful listening service.

[Sonia Kumar (Dudley) (Lab)]

As an NHS physiotherapist working in Dudley, I know very well that mental health is multifaceted. It affects not just one part of a person’s life, but everything: sleep deprivation, diet, overeating, undereating and building relationships. Does the Minister agree that we need more care in the community, including first contact practitioners, social prescribers and councillors in the community as the first line of treatment?

[Andrew Gwynne]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. At the heart of the health mission that the Labour Government want to see is the shift from hospital to community, from analogue to digital and from sickness to prevention. What we do in the community really matters. Our ambition for the future of mental health services is wrapped up in those shifts, particularly the shift from hospital to community.