Labour’s first year in dealing with mental health services has been a reality check
3 min read
It is now a year since the Labour Party came into government. One of its key pledges at the general election was to improve mental health services. So, how has it done?
Disappointingly, the ambition in the manifesto was actually rather limited: employing 8,500 additional mental health staff, introducing Young Futures hubs and reform of the Mental Health Act. Given the progress in transforming mental health services over the previous 10 years, these aims, while welcome, felt unambitious when there is so much left to do to.
It was back in 2017 when, the then-prime minister Theresa May introduced parity of esteem for mental health services in terms of funding, service delivery and ending stigma. As a result, significant progress was made with an additional 26,000 mental health workers employed, mental health teams set up in 50 per cent of schools, and hundreds of crisis centres opened so people going into crisis could be seen by mental health professionals rather than ending up in A&E or police cells.
Furthermore, £2.3bn extra a year was spent on services, and we saw the roll out of Right Care Right Person with the police, the launch of the Suicide Prevention Strategy with £10m grant funding, the introduction of 24/7 mental health helplines linked to 111, mental health ambulances introduced and mental health included in the capital works programme for acute health services.
Yet despite having an opportunity to build on many of these initiatives, the first announcement of the new Labour government was to make the minister for mental health a Lords minister. Many mental health campaigners felt this was a backward step in reducing the prominence of mental health, as scrutiny would be limited without a minister in the House of Commons.
I remember all too often being held to account in the Commons, by the then-shadow health secretary, as to why we hadn’t rolled out mental health teams to 100 per cent of schools. So, it is surprising to see that Labour is only planning to reach 100 per cent by 2030, realising perhaps that it takes time to train these highly-skilled professionals. It is also, perhaps, why Labour has struggled to promise more than 8,500 extra mental health workers. The British Medical Association have been critical of this figure, saying it does not go far enough to tackle increasing demand for mental health services, especially when between 2013 and 2017 an extra 50,000 were recruited, which were still not enough.
On the positive side, Labour has made progress by introducing the Mental Health Bill. It is one of my frustrations that while we did conduct pre-legislative scrutiny on changes to the Mental Health Act 1983, we never introduced a bill to Parliament. I am pleased to see progress being made on this, as there was always cross-party consensus that this needed to be done.
I would sum up Labour’s first year in dealing with mental health services as a “reality check”. It is easy in opposition to pledge going faster in reforming mental health services, but the reality in government is that training staff and establishing new services is harder than people think.
In the remaining years of this Labour government, I would like it to build on the work we did on suicide prevention, the expansion of our mental health crisis centres and the roll out of teams to 100 per cent of schools. These three key areas would improve the mental health of many across the country and leave a legacy that crosses all political lines.
