Children’s mental health – where does the Budget 2015 leave us?

Yesterday’s Budget saw the Chancellor George Osbourne announce an investment of £1.25 billion in children’s mental health services. This is an area which has seen historical under-investment within mental health, and which has continued to take a back seat in local decision-making. Between 2010 and 2013 Young Minds charity found that two thirds of local authorities had reduced their investment in mental health services for young people.

At the Mental Health Foundation we advocate for intervention at the earliest possible stage to ensure that everyone can get the support they need to stay well, and have the tools to recover if they become unwell. The Chancellor’s announcement is therefore a welcome move to provide the investment that is needed in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) to ensure a service that can meet the needs of all young people when they need support.

There has been no shortage of efforts to highlight the need to improve CAMHS in the past: A national review in 2008; the Chief Medical Officer’s Report in 2012; a Health Select Committee report in 2014; and most recently the Government’s CAMHS Taskforce – published only this week. The latest report produced by the Taskforce identified key themes to improve services: prevention and early intervention, improving access to effective support, care for the most vulnerable, accountability and transparency, and developing the workforce. This timely report should provide direction for the new investment in CAMHS to make sure we get a service that is fit for purpose.

The Mental Health Foundation, as part of the We Need to Talk Coalition, has long advocated for the introduction of waiting time standards for access to treatment. A commitment to this was made for adult services earlier in 2014, however there was still a question mark left over the fate of children’s mental health services. The announcement to introduce waiting times for children and young people, made by the Deputy Prime Minister, is therefore very welcome – access to timely treatment can stop people’s mental health deteriorating and reduce the risk of an avoidable crisis. Increased access must be matched with increased choice of a range of treatments, delivered in a way that ensures children and young people’s engagement with them.

Mental health affects us all across our lives and further investment in perinatal mental health services is a welcome step to make sure that pregnant women and new mothers receive equitable access to mental health services. Investment in mental health services at the earliest possible point in the life course should set the tone for the kind of mental health support we can expect to receive across our lives. As with all announcements we need to see this investment transformed into meaningful improvement on the ground, and we hope that it is a marker in the sand for an improvement in services that we can expect for pregnant mums, children, as adults and in later life.

In concluding, whilst we acknowledge that investment in children and young people’s mental health is hugely welcome, we cannot neglect the need to scrutinise accessibility to adult mental health services. There is a duty under the equality act for services to be age inclusive – we need to take prevention just as seriously in later life, mental health problems are not inevitable. Specifically, we know that fewer older people access psychological therapies than people of working age – but we know treatment is just as effective in later life. We also need to ensure that referral routes are accessible for older people.