Mental Health

Part of Backbench Business — [1st Allotted Day] – in the House of Commons at 3:00 pm on 14 June 2012.

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Photo of Andy Burnham Andy Burnham Shadow Secretary of State for Health 3:00, 14 June 2012

I welcome what the Minister has said, but I say clearly to him that we are going to be vigilant about this. We do not want to see things slipping backwards, as we fear they may well do under this NHS reorganisation.

The hon. Member for Strangford made an important point about service personnel. I would like to pay tribute to the organisation Combat Stress, which has done a wonderful job—voluntarily, I think, for many years—giving some help and hope to people who come back here only to find that the statutory services are not providing anything for them. We have to absorb what it has done and the changes it has made into the mainstream to provide much better support. It is beginning to happen, but there is further to go.

On benefits appeals, I echo a point made by my hon. Friend the Member for North Durham. As he said, the number of employment and support allowance cases going to appeal is ridiculous. In 2009-10, the first full year of the ESA regime, 70,535 cases went to appeal at a cost of £19.8 million. In 2010-11, there were 176,567 cases at a cost of £42.2 million. If the Government want to cut waste from the benefit system, they have to get a grip on that. What we find is that 38% of cases—almost four in 10—are overturned on appeal; those cases should not have to go to appeal. My hon. Friend also mentioned the human cost. The financial cost is bad enough, but the stress that people with mental health problems are put through as they go through that process is, in many cases, unbearable. The Minister really needs to talk to his Department for Work and Pensions colleagues to encourage them to get a grip on this important problem. The Atos system is simply not working; it is actually making life a lot harder for some of the most vulnerable people in our society. Ministers need to look urgently at it.

Let me conclude with a point about stigma. I have picked up from today’s debate the fact that Gavin Barwell is bringing forward a private Member’s Bill along the lines of the Bill introduced in the other place by Lord Stevenson, to whom this House should pay tribute. It is wonderful to hear that the hon. Gentleman will introduce that private Member’s Bill. Currently, a person who has had a serious breakdown and has been sectioned under the Mental Health Act 1983 is barred from being an MP, a juror, a school governor or a company director. What message does that send out? It says that recovery is not possible—a message that we might have put out about cancer in the ’50s or ’60s: “Once you have had it, it is a black mark; that’s it, you’re finished.” We urgently need to change that. Today’s debate has probably achieved some change. The Minister indicated his full support for the private Member’s Bill and I can pledge the full support of the Opposition for it. We wish the hon. Gentleman all good luck with it.

I think that today’s debate can begin to change social attitudes in the broader debate on mental health in this country. For the reasons I have set out, I think our debate has been historic, but we have a long way to go. When the Norwegian Prime Minister, Kjell Magne Bondevik had to take some time off, he publicly admitted that it was for depression. That was the reason he gave. Imagine a Prime Minister doing that! But he did so, and he changed the culture in Norway. Moreover, he went on to be re-elected and to become Norway’s longest-serving non-Labour Prime Minister since the second world war. That constituted incredible bravery and political leadership, and I think that we have seen two more examples of those qualities today in the speeches of my hon. Friend the Member for North Durham and the hon. Member for Broxbourne. That is the kind of leadership that changes social attitudes to mental health. Both Members deserve enormous credit for what they have said today, and I think that both have taken a major step towards changing the political debate.

I believe that we must all go back to first principles. I mentioned the start of the NHS. In 1948, the World Health Organisation defined health as

“a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”

Whatever differences we may have about precisely how we should construct the NHS, I think that today Members in all parts of the House can unite behind that definition, with the emphasis on prevention and well-being. I think that we can all commit ourselves to making major changes in the way in which mental health is seen in the House of Commons, the Government and the country, and begin to create a system of care for the 21st century that recognises the difficult, stressful lives that people are leading and gives them support when they need it so that they can fulfil their potential.