Oral Answers to Questions

Toby Perkins Excerpts

Tuesday 1st March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Maggie Throup]

The temporary approval was put in place during the pandemic to address a specific and acute medical need to reduce the risk of transmission of covid-19. It was recognised that without it, significant numbers of women would not have been able to safely access abortion services. Thanks to the success and impact of the national vaccination programme, the situation is now very different. In making this decision, the Secretary of State has considered all the risks and benefits regarding the temporary approval.

[Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

17. What assessment he has made of the adequacy of child mental health in-patient provision in Derbyshire.

[The Minister for Care and Mental Health (Gillian Keegan)]

We want to ensure that more children and young people can access appropriate support in their community, and that those who require in-patient cases are treated as close to home as possible. The East Midlands Provider Collaborative is responsible for commissioning tasks for tier 4 in-patient children and adolescent mental health services, including for Derbyshire. It has implemented strategies to ensure the most efficient use of in-patient beds, including a review of the types of beds required by east midlands patients.

[Mr Perkins]

My constituent Stephen Jones wants what the Minister wants, but when his daughter required in-patient child mental health facilities she was forced to go to Stoke to receive them. He had a 70-mile journey every time he wanted to see her, which was obviously very expensive and also just impossible to do. It meant that his daughter’s mental health got worse, because she felt that she had been abandoned by her own family, putting the whole family under pressure. In addition, if people do not receive universal credit, they get no support with the financial impact. Will the Minister tell us more about how we can ensure that children’s mental health is not exacerbated by the inability to access services locally?

[Gillian Keegan]

The hon. Gentleman raises a very important point. Clearly, these are distressing enough times without having that commute and those travel arrangements on top of that, but sometimes the services are highly specialised. We are trying to get the right blend between access to highly specialised in-patient services and making sure that we increase community efforts. We have been working very hard to ensure that there are more community efforts, but we have also invested £10 million more in capital for more beds to make sure people can get treatment closer to home.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sajid Javid]

First, I pay tribute to my hon. Friend and to my right hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes) for all the work they have done on this most important of issues. Over the past few months, we have all heard in this House some horrific examples of botched, non-cosmetic procedures scarring people for life. No longer will that be allowed. We will be introducing a licensing regime for such procedures. The details of the regime will be set out in regulations, meaning that it will be flexible, agile and change in response to changes in the cosmetics industry.

[Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

T4. The response from the hon. Member for Lewes (Maria Caulfield) to the question from my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson) on health inequalities gives me no confidence that the Government have a plan to address these inequalities at all. She says that we have had a pandemic—of course we have, but the point is that it has happened everywhere. What does it say about this Government’s priorities that waiting times are escalating to a far greater extent in more deprived communities than they are in the more affluent communities that the Tories are so happy to represent?

[Maria Caulfield]

I can only reiterate that we have a laser focus on this issue, and that is why we will be bringing forward the health disparities White Paper. I also point the hon. Gentleman to the NHS’s approach of the Core20PLUS5, where it is targeting the most deprived 20% of the population in five clinical priority areas: maternity, severe mental illness, chronic respiratory disease, early cancer diagnosis and hypertension. We will deliver on resolving disparities issues.