Lord Mawson (CB)

I support Amendment 148 from the noble Lord, Lord Crisp. I have just arrived back from a three-day event with Professor Brian Cox in Northern Ireland, where we had been bringing together the NHS, schools, the business community and the public sector around a whole programme on innovation and how we think about the future with regard to these matters, taking the principles that we originally developed at the Bromley by Bow Centre in the East End of London, now nationally across the country. If I look like I am in recovery, it is because I am—I have literally just landed trying to get back here. I apologise that I could not take part in the Second Reading, because being a working Peer, sometimes it is not very easy to fit all this into the diary. One does one’s best. I am very aware of the questions that the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, is raising. Indeed, I tabled a number of Written Questions this week about this very matter. I support the amendments because we have a very serious problem out there. My GP colleagues are telling me, as the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, has said, that one in five adults in England is on antidepressants; it is one in four in Scotland. This is a really serious problem. As a country, we need to return to a discussion and a conversation, as the Health Secretary—I hope, in the spring—prepares to help us rethink the future of the NHS. We need to return to the question that we asked 40 years ago in the East End of London, the fundamental question: “What is health?” What we see happening here is serious for hundreds of thousands of people and is driving a culture. We also need to start to worry about what is happening within the machinery of the NHS and the state, as it drives these sorts of cultures. Finally, as I put down in one of my Written Questions, we need to be asking, practically, “How much is it costing the taxpayer to drive these kinds of cultures?” It is serious, but the problem is also an opportunity, if interest is raised in the work of those of us who have been doing stuff on the front line for many years with our GP colleagues. I see the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, there: we have rebuilt a street together, with a £40 million school, a £60 million health centre, 600 homes and now a primary school, exploring this, in what when we began was a dysfunctional housing estate. There is a real opportunity out there, but we now need to get real about antidepressants.