Children’s Health

Tom Hayes Excerpts

Thursday 10th July 2025 Commons Chamber

[Tom Hayes (Bournemouth East) (Lab)]

We know the problems facing children’s health, and we know the scale of those problems—there is more than enough evidence—so in the time I have I will focus on some of the solutions. I welcome the Government’s commitment to rolling forward youth hubs, to recruiting 8,500 mental health workers and, through the plan for change, to introducing Best Starts, our revamped Sure Start centres. An excellent Institute for Fiscal Studies report shows the effect of Sure Start, and its findings should inform how we develop Best Starts.

I do not want to spend a long time talking about how we reframe the architecture and the organisations that deliver children’s health, but I do think that is not quite in the right place. Service users fundamentally do not care about who delivers what services; they just want the highest quality services. My concern is that we have services concentrated at the local authority level for children’s health, when they should not be placed there. We know that the best-run services are typically health services, because they have structural advantages in terms of data and the experience of spending capital funding and getting things off the ground quickly.

We also know that some of the experiences of children’s social care are not entirely as they should be. The attempt to unify children’s health and children’s social care within local authorities with a director for children’s services in an upper-tier local authority has had a mixed record, and it would be wise for us to think about whether children’s social care—or, indeed, adult social care—ought be put at the local authority level, or whether there ought to be a different place to deliver it, perhaps at a national level and perhaps at a national health level.

In a previous life before I was elected, I ran mental health, domestic abuse and homelessness services, and I embedded caseworkers in local authority settings to support families with mental health issues, domestic abuse prevalence and substance misuse. I also delivered services as part of the last Government’s community mental health framework—particularly personality disorder services. The embedding of third sector organisations is definitely a positive. There are limits to what they can do, but they can do outstanding things; they can build strong relationships with people who often lack trust in statutory agencies, and they can deliver bespoke support, often beside NHS or local authority support. I would therefore want a larger role for our third sector.

In closing, I want to talk about special educational needs and disabilities. We all know that the system is broken. We know that it is adversarial. We know that parents are at breaking point. We know that there are not enough spaces in specialist provision. We know, too, that EHCPs take too long and the process is difficult. As a consequence, it can feel dehumanising. I look forward to the Government working collaboratively with families, putting them at the heart of changes to develop the best solution. I have a survey available to constituents in Bournemouth East, and I encourage them to complete it or to email me, because I need to hear from them in order to represent them to Government, so that we can get the best possible system.