Young People’s Mental Health

Debate between Tim Loughton and Barbara Keeley

Thursday 27th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Tim Loughton]

The hon. Gentleman is right; he pre-empts a couple of my comments. From my experience as a former Minister—and, I am sure, from his—the term “joined-up government” is a complete illusion. Joined-up government does not happen in practice. On becoming a Minister, one is cocooned in a Department, and instead of having a dialogue with colleagues in the Division Lobby or wherever, a huge wall suddenly comes between you. Trying to get interdepartmental action becomes really frustrating.

I remember setting up something called the youth action group, which consisted of Ministers from nine or 10 Departments and representatives of six major children’s charities. It was co-chaired by the Prince’s Trust and Barnardo’s. The charities came to us with problems—often complex ones—affecting young people. One example related to housing benefit and accommodation for children in care. I cannot remember what the specific problem was, but it involved housing, which was the remit of the Department for Communities and Local Government, and benefits, which were the remit of the Department for Work and Pensions, as well as children in care, who came under the remit of the Department for Education. Normally there was a vicious circle that involved people being pushed from pillar to post. Alas, that committee has not met for the past 15 months or so, but our meetings used to consist of at least six actual Ministers—not just civil servants—from the relevant Departments as well as their officials. We would get Ministers together and ask them to go away and solve the problem.

Mental illness falls into that category, in that it is not simply the remit of the Department of Health or the Department for Education. There are many other implications and knock-on effects that can relate to the underlying cause of somebody’s mental illness problems. The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that the structure of government needs to be much better. We need taskforces that genuinely cut across Government Departments, but in my experience they will flourish only if they have the buy-in and direct engagement of Ministers at the top. One welcome initiative from the hon. Gentleman’s party was the appointment of a Cabinet-level Minister for mental health. I think that that appointment has slightly gone by the wayside now, but the principle behind it was absolutely right, in that it tried to join up all the relevant Departments at the top table.

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

May I remind the hon. Gentleman that I am the shadow Cabinet Minister for mental health? That post has not gone away on this side of the House.

[Tim Loughton]

I am delighted to hear that; I did not in any way mean to underestimate the hon. Lady’s contribution. However, when the hon. Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Luciana Berger) held the position, she sat at the Cabinet table. I hope that that is still the case, and I would very much like to see my own party replicate that position in government, because this is such an important cross-cutting issue.

Mental health remains the Cinderella service of the NHS. Indeed, the report describes child and adolescent mental health services—CAMHS—as the Cinderella service of a Cinderella service. The whole question of parity of esteem and funding is important. We can have arguments about how much the NHS budget has increased and kept up with inflation, but in every year in which the funding for mental health remains static or, worse still, declines as a portion of the overall NHS budget, we are sending out a clear message that it is a secondary priority within the NHS, and therein lies part of the problem.

I do not want to be too negative, however. We are making progress, as are other countries. For example, when you go in through the main entrance of a hospital in Copenhagen, in Denmark, you turn left if you have diabetes and you turn right if you have a mental illness. And nobody cares whether you turn left or right; there is no stigma attached to mental illness. People are treated on exactly the same basis, and that is how we need to treat mental illness here. Despite the best intentions of many Ministers, that is just not happening in practice at the sharp end where our young constituents are trying to access the mental health support that they desperately need. It is certainly not happening in a uniform way across the whole country. As a result, at least one in four people in this country is still suffering from a mental health problem.

I have a particular interest in perinatal mental health, and I declare an interest in that I chair the all-party parliamentary group for conception to age two—the first 1,001 days. I am also chairman of the trustees of the Parent and Infant Partnership Projects charity. We now have seven parent infant partnerships—PIPs—across the country providing direct support and specialist perinatal psychological help to mums and dads with newborn babies. About half of all cases of perinatal depression and anxiety go undetected, and many of those that are detected fail to receive evidence-based forms of treatment. Alarmingly, at the time of the publication of the all-party group’s report, “Building Great Britons”, in February last year, just 3% of clinical commissioning groups in England had a strategy for commissioning perinatal mental health services. The upshot of all that, as the Maternal Mental Health Alliance has calculated, is a cost to the NHS of £8.1 billion for each one-year cohort of births in the United Kingdom. That is the equivalent of almost £10,000 for every single birth in this country, and it is a cost that the NHS can ill afford.

Why is this relevant to young people? Nearly three quarters of that cost relates to the adverse impacts on the child rather than the mother. Followers of attachment theory, which the hon. Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown) mentioned, will appreciate the strong link between achieving a strong attachment between the child and the primary carer and good nurturing from the earliest age—that is, from conception to the age of two, as our report puts it—when the synapses in the brain are developing at a rate of some 40,000 a second and the child’s brain, character and development are being formed. The earliest experiences shape a baby’s brain development and have a lifelong impact on that person’s mental and emotional health.

Research shows a direct link between what happens to a mum during the perinatal period and her child in later life. If a teenager aged 15 or 16 is suffering from some form of depression, there is something like a 90% chance that his or her mum suffered from perinatal depression. The link is that clear, so it is absolutely a false economy not to help mum out at that early stage. And let us not forget dad, who also plays a crucial role. Getting it right with parents and children early on is crucial to the good mental health of children and young people. This is not rocket science—technically it is neuroscience—and we should be doing it better, sooner.

Certain other factors have been flagged up in the report. My hon. Friend the Member for High Peak (Andrew Bingham) spoke about many of them, including the peer group pressure that our children and young people experience. In fact, I have no children any more. My youngest is now over the age of 18, but we went through the teenage years together and I have seen these things at first hand. No one can go out in the morning without the latest iPhone, without checking Facebook and without tweeting what they are having for breakfast and Instagramming a photograph of it. And that all happens just after they have got up. The pressure to succeed in school and the hothouse of exams and testing are not conducive to the best mental health, and young people need support to help them through the challenges. We never had those challenges in my day, which I guess was even earlier than that of my hon. Friend the Member for High Peak. Social media is a huge influence on young people, and it was just not around in my day. I would hazard a guess that it was not around in your day either, Madam Deputy Speaker.

State Pension Age Equalisation

Debate between Tim Loughton and Barbara Keeley

Wednesday 2nd December 2015 Westminster Hall

[Barbara Keeley]

I agree, and I thank my hon. Friend for making those points so early in the debate.

The changes brought about by the 2011 Act affect the lives of millions of women born in 1954 and throughout the 1950s who are unfairly bearing the burden and the personal costs of increasing the state pension age. The changes were controversial at the time, and there was great debate about the need to address the unfair consequences of the Act. Speaking to Channel 4 News in May 2011, the director general of Saga said:

“Men won’t have any increase before 2018 and no man will have his pension increased by more than one year. Half a million women will. We accept that the pension age will have to rise but it is the timing and the broken promise that we feel is unfair. No money will be saved during this Parliament, so it’s got not about cutting the deficit. We don’t need to hurry this through to have a sustainable pension system…Many women are furious and desperate about how they are going to manage, particularly the more vulnerable women who may already have retired, who may be ill or be caring for someone. They may have made careful plans for retirement, only to have the Government pull the rug from under their feet. They can’t just work for longer, because they may have retired already.”

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing a debate on this important issue, which has crept up on many of us and affects many more women that many hon. Members will have appreciated. Does she agree that, whatever one thinks about raising the pension age, probably the most scandalous thing is the lack of notice given to women? The 650,000 women most affected by the speed-up were born between April 1953 and 1955, and they have effectively been told between the ages of 57 and 59, a matter of months ahead, that their pension age is now no longer 60. For them, planning is just not possible.

[Barbara Keeley]

Indeed. I was going to come on to that, but I hope the hon. Gentleman will think back to the Government of 1995, who started these changes.

[Tim Loughton]

I haven’t been here that long.

[Barbara Keeley]

The hon. Gentleman was here in 2011, when some of the affected women lobbied their MPs about the proposals in the then Pensions Bill. Saga commented:

“Putting pensions on a sustainable long-term footing does not justify the sudden increase being imposed on one group of women at such short notice”—

that is exactly the point he raises—

“especially when the Government knows that these particular women are more vulnerable than men and have little or no private pension wealth. Also, many are already out of the labour market and have made careful plans for their future, which are now in disarray.”

Ironically, the then director general of Saga is now the Conservative Minister for Pensions in the other place. When I wrote to her on behalf of a constituent earlier this year she told me:

“I tried hard in 2011 but there is nothing more I can do I’m afraid. It is not in my power.”