Young People’s Mental Health — House of Commons, 2016-10-27
Topic: Health
Lyn Carol Brown (Labour, Centre-left): Absolutely. I totally agree with my hon. Friend, and as I go through my speech I am hoping to provide an example to show how intervention is particularly important for a very young child because of the impact on the rest of the family. Early intervention can do a lot to mitigate other events and difficulties occurring in the family that might include other family members, too Unfortunately, tragically and outrageously, young people’s mental health services often receive less attention than adult mental health services, so that young people’s mental health services have been called the "Cinderella of Cinderella services". In November 2014, the Health Committee found that there were "serious and deeply ingrained problems with the commissioning and provision of services for young people’s mental health." Many providers reported increased waiting times and increased referral thresholds for specialist services, where patients would have to show severer symptoms to receive treatment than they would have done in the past. GPs reported feeling ill-equipped and lacking in confidence when dealing with young people’s mental health issues. The Select Committee found that early intervention programmes were "suffering from insecure or short term funding, or being cut altogether." There really is no excuse for this failing. Around half of people with lifetime mental health problems experience symptoms by the age of 14, and about 75% of them before the age of 18. Catching these problems early could well lessen the severity of adult problems, possibly saving the NHS money in the long term. More importantly, I would suggest, it would reduce unnecessary suffering and enable people to live better lives I want to be fair to the Government, who have recognised that there is a problem. In 2014 they set up a children and young people’s mental health and wellbeing taskforce, which made a number of recommendations in its 2015 "Future in mind" report. The taskforce identified a number of problems with young people’s mental health services. The right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb), who was then the responsible Minister, said that there needed to be a fundamental shift in culture, with a much greater focus on prevention and early intervention The taskforce rightly recognised that one of the challenges facing young people’s mental health services was—unsurprisingly—funding. I was pleased when the Government responded by announcing the provision of an additional £1.4 billion of transitional funding for youth mental health services, but that additional money needs to be considered in the context of the less encouraging overall picture of mental health services funding. NHS England’s planning guidance states that all clinical commissioning groups must increase their spending on mental health services by at least as much as their overall budget increases. However, there have been warnings from organisations including mental health trusts that mental health funding is not properly ring-fenced, and that NHS England’s target is being missed Let me again follow in the footsteps of my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood. We know from the responses to a series of freedom of information requests from my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Luciana Berger) that more than 50% of CCGs intend to spend a smaller proportion of their budgets on mental health in 2016-17. That clearly demonstrates that what the Government tried to do has failed, and that that target is being missed as well.