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Mental health services to get £1.25bn extra funding to treat 110,000 children, Nick Clegg announces
Mental health services to get £1.25bn extra funding to treat 110,000 children, Nick Clegg announces
(about 1 hour later)
An extra £1.25 billion will be spent on mental health services over the next five years, Nick Clegg has announced.
Deputy prime minister Nick Clegg has announced that that £1.25bn of fresh funding over five years to treat 110,000 children with mental health issues in England will be unveiled in this week's budget.
The Deputy Prime Minister said the money would help more than 100,000 youngsters struggling with mental health problems.
At an additional £250m a year from 2015-16, this is a 35 per cent rise on the existing £700m budget to treat children with mental health disorders. Mr Clegg, who is at the Liberal Democrat spring conference in Liverpool this weekend, said this would create “a seismic shift to revolutionise children's mental healthcare”.
Mr Clegg, who made the announcement during a visit to Clock View Hospital in Liverpool, said the way children had been treated before was an "institutionalised form of cruelty".
In his keynote speech tomorrow, Mr Clegg will point out that three children in every classroom suffer from mental health problems. He will say: “In out country there are thousands upon thousands of children with mental health problems who go without support or treatment... That can't be allowed to carry on.”
The £250 million a year funding will be confirmed in next week's Budget.
A Lib Dem said that the issue had been a “passion” of Mr Clegg's for many years. However, Labour's shadow public health spokeswoman, Luciana Berger, recently accused the coalition of “breaking its promise on mental health”, after a parliamentary answer revealed that spending on children's treatment had fallen by £50m in real terms between 2009-10 and 2012-13. The Lib Dem source admitted there had been problems that some NHS areas had cut services, but that this £1.25bn was guaranteed to be allocated to children's mental health under an agreement with NHS England.
Mr Clegg said: "I think it will have a huge impact. You have got, on average, three children in every classroom in our country who have got mental health problems and are not being properly catered for, not being properly identified, not being properly supported.
Mr Clegg also announced that there will be the first-ever waiting tomes standards for children's mental health treatment. Specialists in children's speech therapy will be available in every part of the country from 2018.
"This huge expansion - £1.25 billion over the course of the next parliament - will help around 110,000 children, children who at the moment are being let down by the system.
"It's an institutionalised form of cruelty, the way we allow vulnerable children with mental health problems to basically have to fend for themselves at the moment.
"This big announcement I'm making is going to seek to change that. It won't happen overnight, it will happen over the coming years."
He added: "It's all part of a journey where we start, as a country, lifting the stigma that has surrounded mental health and making sure that we treat mental health in the same way as we do people with physical health problems."
The funding will also help improve support for new mothers, who had previously struggled with a "second-class mental health service", Mr Clegg said.
"It is terrifying to think that in this day and age some new mothers are having to travel miles for treatment and others are even being separated from their newborn child This has to stop," he said.
"This funding will make sure they get the treatment and support they need so they in turn can give their children the best possible start in life."
Mr Clegg, who was in Liverpool for the Liberal Democrats' spring conference, blamed some local NHS commissioners for failing to pass on previous Government funding for children's mental health.
"Along with this extra money we are also saying, and NHS England is saying, to all local commissioners they have to give the right amount of money to mental health," he said.
"We need to have central government, that's providing the money, working hand in glove with local decision-makers so that they don't short-change local mental health trusts.
"It is starting to change now, but I accept it is a big culture change because for far too long people in the NHS have not provided the amount of resources and support to mental health which it deserves."
