Chesterfield MP Toby Perkins has called upon Ministers to take urgent action to tackle childrens’ mental health after Labour held an Opposition Day Debate on the issue.
The debate took place only weeks after reports in local newspapers about children and their families who were unable to access mental health support locally, with one father having to travel to Stoke to visit his daughter.
Unfortunately, due to his frontbench role as Shadow FE & Skills Minister, Toby was unable to speak during the debate – as childrens’ mental health partly comes under the Education portfolio.
Toby stated “Childrens’ mental health is such an important issue and I’m pleased that a future Labour government would take urgent action on this issue. Locally, constituents have been rightly very worried by the £30m of savage cuts centrally from the Conservative government to our area. Reports in the Derbyshire Times about a serious shortage of beds for children who need support with their mental health have been deeply unsettling. I’ll keep up the pressure on the government in any way I can to keep this issue on the agenda”.
Toby has previously written to the Derby & Derbyshire CCG regarding this issue and raised the matter with Health Secretary Sajid Javid via a Written Parliamentary Question.
During the Opposition Day Debate, Labour recommitted to their mental health pledges first made at last year’s Labour Party Conference:
- Guarantee mental health treatment within a month for all who need it, setting a new NHS target, ensuring that patients start receiving appropriate treatment – not simply an initial assessment of needs – within a month of referral
- Recruit 8,500 new staff so that one million additional people can access treatment every year by the end of Labour’s first term in office
- Put an open access mental health hub for children and young people in every community, providing early intervention, drop-in services
- Provide specialist mental health support in every school to support pupils and resolve problems before they escalate. This plan would see a full-time mental health professional in every secondary school and a part time professional in every primary school
- Improve service quality, bringing in the first ever long-term, whole-Government plan for improving mental health outcomes, making early-intervention a reality, and broadening the range of services to those with severe mental health illnesses
- Give mental health its fair share of funding, pledging that NHS spending on mental health will never fall and a fair share of mental health funding every time new funding is provided to the NHS.