In My View: Harriet Harman, MP for Camberwell and Peckham

This is Mental Health Awareness Week. And our mental health services are in crisis.

Across England, 1.2 million people are waiting for mental health treatment.

Whether you get help when you need it depends on where you live.

The situation is so bad that two-fifths of patients waiting for mental health treatment end up in a crisis, needing emergency or crisis services, before they get treatment.

And one in 10 patients end up in A&E.

The length of time children have to wait for mental health services have been described as “agonising” by the Young Minds charity.

In some parts of the country vulnerable children are waiting almost three years to get the mental health care they need.

For people in Camberwell and Peckham, waiting times are even worse than the national average.

In South-east London, Clinical Commissioning Group, which covers Camberwell and Peckham, the time people have to wait for mental health care exceeds the national average for the time it takes people to access their first treatment.

Nationally the average wait to get your first treatment following referral was 20.9 days.

For people in Camberwell and Peckham the average waits were 22.8 days.

And while people suffer from the lack of mental health services, their inability to get the help they need hits other services too.

When people can’t get mental health care they often end up in crisis and the police get called out.

When I met Sir Mark Rowley the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police this week at Peckham police station he told me that 40 per cent of the incidents attended to by Met response units were mental health-related.

Police officers called out to go to mental health incidents often end up taking the person to A&E for treatment and then have to stay with them in hospital until they get seen by a doctor.

This means that police officers are not able to be out on the streets carrying out their frontline policing roles.

It means that A&E services are occupied by people who should have been seen long before it got to that point.

And it also means a suffering person has to wait in A&E which is not the right place for them and where they wouldn’t need to be if they had been treated before they had a crisis.

This is not a new problem caused by pressure on services arising from the Covid-19 legacy. It is the result of failures by the Tory Government.

Even before Covid-19, in 2018, a report by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary reported “grave concerns” about police officers having to attend so many mental health-related incidents.

The report blamed our broken mental health system.

Like so many of our services which have deteriorated under the Tories, a Labour government will have to fix this.

Labour will focus on prevention, guaranteeing NHS treatment in a month for anyone who needs it, recruiting thousands of mental health professionals and putting mental health support in every secondary school.

And unlike the Tories, a Labour government will guarantee a fair share of health funding for mental health.

One in four adults, and one in 10 children, experience some form of mental illness.

Ensuring they receive quality care and treatment is the least we can do to help their suffering and will be a priority for a Labour government.