Conception to Age 2: The First 1001 Days — House of Commons, 2015-12-17
Topic: Health
Norman Peter Lamb (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): Oh, I do apologise. To me, he is right honourable. He has shown great leadership, both as a Minister and in his work since, and I applaud him for that. I also join others in acknowledging the fantastic leadership shown by the hon. Members for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom) and for Nottingham North (Mr Allen) Like the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham, I had the one-to-one seminar with George Hosking from the WAVE Trust. I had it many years ago, but I remember it still very clearly: the evidence he showed me, from Australia and the United States, was compelling. He is rightly on a mission and has had a significant influence, which should be acknowledged, so I join the hon. Gentleman in thanking him for his amazing work I want to focus on perinatal mental health. Here, we are dealing with two lives: the mother’s and the baby’s. The impact of mental ill health in the first year after birth is profound. As the hon. Gentleman said, it affects up to 20% of women. We often think of it as post-natal depression, but it goes much wider than that. The London School of Economics’ personal social services research unit and the Centre for Mental Health have produced an important piece of work on the economics of this. They refer to anxiety, psychosis, post-traumatic stress disorder and other conditions, including obsessive compulsive disorder. The impact of these conditions on the mother, but also on the baby and the wider family, can be very profound The cost of failure, as the hon. Member for Nottingham North made clear, is enormous. The report by the LSE and the Centre for Mental Health estimates the cost of perinatal ill health as being £8.1 billion at the very minimum. The basis for calculation was the mothers who suffered depression, anxiety and psychosis, but they recognised that other conditions were relevant, too, which have not been costed, so the overall cost is bigger. We must understand that. As the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham made clear, this amounts to £10,000 for every baby born in this country. The cost of failure is just enormous How have we responded to this extraordinary impact? Slowly but surely, things are changing, but if we look at the recently published map on the availability of services around the country—this relates to the UK’s specialist community perinatal mental health teams—we see that in 2015, the map is still horribly red. This does not indicate constituencies held by the Labour party—[Interruption.] Thank goodness! This indicates the parts of the country where no specialist team is available. Let us imagine for one moment that this was the case for stroke care or heart conditions: there would be a national outcry No party or Government is responsible for this situation. We are dealing with an emerging understanding, and it is about developing a new service. When I look at the whole of East Anglia, my own region, I see that not a single specialist team is available. That is truly shocking. As the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham said, people are dying, and some even take their own lives, yet these are deaths that could be prevented by the application of specialist services around our country. None of us can be comfortable with the fact that so much of our country does not have the ready availability of support for mothers in this situation There is an urgency to ensuring that we act to get the whole country covered. I was pleased when in response to the cross-party campaign for equality for mental health, we had the basic simple principle that there should be equal access to care and support—irrespective of whether people have a mental or a physical health problem. At the moment, that does not exist, but the campaign that we launched in the run-up to the spending review secured a response from the Chancellor of an extra £600 million for mental health. In his statement to Parliament, the Chancellor specifically mentioned the importance of perinatal mental health services. That money must be used I end by urging the Minister to do everything in his power to instil a real sense of urgency, with a programme and a timetable to get every part of the country covered by specialist services. I find it unbelievable in this day and age that the CCGs mentioned by the hon. Gentleman have not even started to think about this yet. These are the people who hold responsibility in our NHS for commissioning services for our populations, but a significant number of them have not yet even started the process of thinking about the problem. The message needs to go out from the Minister, but also from NHS England nationally, that this situation is intolerable and cannot be sustained. We must ensure that this Parliament reaches the point by 2020 when the whole of that map of the United Kingdom is green, so that every mother, when she is in need, following birth, can get access to the specialist services that can help her to recover.