Health and Social Care Committee and Education Committee

Barbara Keeley Excerpts

Thursday 10th May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Luciana Berger]

I thank the hon. Lady for her important contribution, which emphasised the need to focus on the workforce that the Government are expecting to deliver their Green Paper plans. We know that Health Education England is due to publish in July this year its workforce strategy, and I sincerely hope that it has listened to the points we heard in the Committee and those that she just made about the massive gap that exists in terms of psychologists and child psychiatrists in the community. That is a critical issue.

On the hon. Lady’s point about comorbidities, there is a gaping hole in the Government’s Green Paper on the children who are the most vulnerable and need the most support. There are references to children from the most vulnerable backgrounds, but nothing in practice about how that might be addressed. I hope that, in the Government’s response, they will reflect on our recommendations and seek to bring forward proposals that target children who most need support.

[Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on the way she has introduced the report and the Select Committees on producing it. She will know that YoungMinds and NHS Providers have expressed concerns about the fact that increasingly high eligibility thresholds for child and adolescent mental health services mean that the mental ill health of children and young people escalates to crisis point before a referral. That was reinforced by the Care Quality Commission’s thematic review, which recently reported that GPs were telling children to pretend to be more ill than they were, to ensure they got treatment. There is much for the Government to respond to in the report, but will she join me in calling on them to investigate that urgently?

[Luciana Berger]

I thank my hon. Friend for her important contribution. On the thresholds over which children have to jump to access services in the first place, I get emails almost every week from young people or their parents or carers, sharing their experiences of how long it has taken them to get access to services, if they have even been able to get through the door at all. Young people are having to attempt to take their lives before they see a clinical professional. That is not acceptable, and the Government need to address it now if they are going to successfully implement their plans.

One of our recommendations was that within the mental health investment standard introduced by the Government to ensure that clinical commissioning groups apportion a certain amount of funds to mental health, there should be a specific ring fence for children and young people’s mental health. We know from the investigations and research that has been done that at the moment, too many clinical commissioning groups are diverting money away from young people’s mental health to other parts of the NHS. It is under enormous strain, but that money needs to be protected.