Josh MacAlister

It is humbling to contribute to a debate with contributions like that from the hon. Member for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire (Ian Sollom). I pay tribute to him for sharing Declan’s story in this place, and to my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Jen Craft) for her very personal contribution. I warmly welcome the fact that the Government are giving this issue the prioritisation that it richly deserves. The reforms will give patients greater choice and enhanced rights, and ensure that everybody is treated with dignity and respect throughout treatment. I will make three broad points about mental health services in England and how they relate to the passage of this Bill. The first is about Cumbria’s hidden crisis. Cumbria’s suicide rate is 50% higher than that in the rest of the country. Over five people die from suicide every month in Cumbria—more than double the number of road deaths. Each one of these lives lost is a tragedy. They leave behind families, friends, co-workers, neighbours and emergency workers—a web of people in the community who try to make sense of the grief, loss and shock. Some fantastic local organisations in my constituency are working to bring that number down, including Every Life Matters, Andy’s Man Club and the West Cumbria Mental Health Partnership, but they are fighting a growing problem of depleted resources. It is in this context that we need excellent mental health services, so it was particularly welcome that, weeks after the general election last year, the Government funded a new initiative called Hope Haven, an open-access mental health hub with some accommodation attached to it. This new service is being built by brilliant local partners in my constituency as we speak, and I have high hopes for the contribution that it can make. However, the new service has come at the same time that Cumbria, Northumberland, Tyne and Wear NHS foundation trust has made the regrettable decision to close Yewdale ward, an in-patient mental health ward in Whitehaven that is the only in-patient service in the area. If it does close, patients will need to travel for over an hour to reach the nearest in-patient service, and the community has very poor public transport options. I have called for the ICB to investigate the process that has been followed to reach the decision, so that we can pause the closure. If we are to improve mental health services across our country, the reforms need to work for rural, isolated and coastal areas too. My second broad point is about the needs of people with experience of growing up in the care system and the link to mental health services. Care-experienced adults are hugely over-represented in our systems of mental health detention, assessment and treatment, so the much-needed reforms will be a particularly welcome change for this group.