Children and Young People: Mental Health Services — House of Lords, 2018-03-08
Topic: Health
James O’Shaughnessy (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, with the leave of the House, I will repeat as a Statement the Answer to an Urgent Question given by my honourable friend the Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Health, Steve Brine, in the other place. The Statement is as follows: "This morning the Care Quality Commission published its report Are We Listening? Review of Children and Young People’s Mental Health Services. This is the second piece of work commissioned by the Prime Minister in January 2017 to look at this area of services. Findings include: examples of good or innovative practice, and dedicated people working in every part of the system; a number of areas with strong practice, ensuring that patients and families are involved in planning care; and concerns around join-up between children’s services The Government have already committed to making available an additional £1.4 billion to improve children and young people’s mental health services, to deliver on the commitments in Future in Mind and NHS England’s Five Year Forward View for Mental Health. The CQC welcomes this progress in its report Spend is reaching the front line. Last year we saw a 20% increase on clinical commissioning group spend for children and young people’s mental health, rising from £516 million in 2015-16 to £619 million in 2016-17. By 2021, we have committed to ensuring that 70,000 more children and young people each year will have access to high-quality NHS mental health care when they need it. But we know there is still much to do. As Claire Murdoch, the national mental health director for NHS England, said in response to this report, CAMHS services, "are now improving, but from a starting point of historic under-funding and legacy under-staffing, relative to rapidly growing need" In December, the Department of Health and social care, jointly with the Department for Education, published our Green Paper Transforming Children and Young People’s Mental Health Provision. This Green Paper already responds to a number of the problems raised by the CQC in its report, and sets out a range of proposals to strengthen the way schools and specialist NHS mental health services work together, and to reduce the amount of time that children and young people have to wait to access specialist help. These proposals are backed by an additional £300 million-worth of funding. We have carried out extensive face-to-face consultation on the Green Paper proposals and have received a very high volume of responses to our online consultation. We will respond to the CQC review, alongside the Green Paper consultation, in the summer The report also calls for the Secretary of State to use the inter-ministerial group on mental health to guarantee greater collaboration across government departments in prioritising mental health. This recommendation is already in hand. The inter-ministerial group has already contributed to the development of the Green Paper and will continue to provide leadership on the issues that this report raises The report also recommends that everyone who works, volunteers or cares for children and young people is trained in mental health awareness. We are already rolling out mental health first-aid training to every secondary school and have committed to rolling out mental health awareness training to all primary schools by 2022. We are also set to launch a campaign to raise awareness among 1 million people around mental health and are a major funder of the Time to Change campaign, which has shifted public attitudes on mental health This Government remain committed to making mental health everyone’s business and building good mental health for all our children and young people".