Health Visitors (England)

Debate between Tim Loughton and Baroness Berger

Wednesday 23rd October 2019 Westminster Hall

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the reduction in the number of health visitors in England.

I am grateful to the hon. Members who have come to speak on this important subject. I declare an interest as the chair of the all-party parliamentary group for conception to age two—the first 1,001 days. I also chair the board of trustees of the Parent-Infant Foundation, which runs attachment facilities and lobbies for better early intervention around the country.

I will start with some slightly alarming statistics. The cost of perinatal mental ill health in this country has been worked out at £8.1 billion per annum, according to the Maternal Mental Health Alliance, with up to 20% of women experiencing some form of mental health problem during pregnancy or the first 12 months after birth. The cost of child neglect in this country has been estimated at some £15 billion, with 50% of all maltreatment-related deaths and serious injuries occurring to infants and babies under the age of one. We currently spend in excess of £23 billion getting it wrong in those early years, particularly for mums and new babies. That is equivalent to something like half the defence budget.

There are 122,000 babies under the age of one living with a parent who has some form of mental health problem. Amazingly—this statistic came out time and again during conversations on the Domestic Abuse Bill—a third of domestic violence begins during pregnancy, and suicide is one of the leading causes of death for women during pregnancy or in the year after giving birth. About 40% of children in the United Kingdom have an insecure attachment to a parent or carer at the age of 12 months, according to Professor Peter Fonagy and others. Alarmingly, there is a 99% correlation between a teenager experiencing some form of mental illness or depression at the age of 15 or 16 and his or her mother having had some form of perinatal mental ill health during pregnancy. It is that close a correlation, making it that much more important that we make sure that the mums bearing those children, and also fathers, are as happy, settled and healthy as possible in those early stages, from conception to age two.

[Luciana Berger (Liverpool, Wavertree) (LD)]

The hon. Gentleman set out the costs incurred in trying to prevent such travesties. Does he agree that the figures he refers to are actually conservative estimates? I believe that he was at the launch, quite a number of years ago, of the Maternal Mental Health Alliance, which arrived at the figure of more than £8 billion. Is it not the case that, although the economic costs are significant, it is the social and moral reasons that have brought Members from both sides of the House here for this important debate?

[Tim Loughton]

If the hon. Lady is patient, I will come on to the social impacts. I think the MMHA report came out in 2014 or 2015, so obviously things will have moved on, although the birth rate has slightly fallen in that time as well. These are substantial financial figures, but as she says, most important are the social impacts and the impact on the child.

On the physical impacts, our childhood obesity rates are among the worst in Europe, while breastfeeding rates in the United Kingdom are among the lowest in the world. We have rising emergency department attendances by children under the age of five, and infant mortality reductions have recently stalled. Just last week, we had the worrying figures about the dwindling vaccination rates in England in particular, with only 86.4% of children having received a full dose of the MMR vaccine. We have effectively lost our immune status, because the World Health Organisation vaccination target to protect a population from a disease is 95%.

The Children’s Commissioner estimates that, in total, 2.3 million children live with risk because of a vulnerable family background, but that, within that group, more than a third are effectively invisible and not known to services and therefore do not get any support. We are talking about an expensive and widespread problem.