Jack Abbott

It is a privilege to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Sojan Joseph) for securing this important debate on World Mental Health Day. Sitting in the Chamber are Members from every corner of the country and from all sides of the House—evidence that the mental health crisis is undeniably a national one. My constituents in Ipswich, under the Norfolk and Suffolk mental health trust, suffer a particularly desperate service in an already broken system. Since its creation in 2012, the Norfolk and Suffolk foundation trust has been—it arguably still is—the worst-performing mental health trust in the whole country. It was the first mental health trust to be put into special measures, in 2015, and it was then put into the NHS recovery support programme when the body was set up in 2021. We are almost entirely accustomed to the slew of reports that find that the trust “requires improvement” or is “inadequate”, but time does not allow me to give a detailed overview of the litany of failures that have brought us to this point. However, there are two key tenets to the scandal. First, there is the scandal of the perhaps euphemistically named unexpected or avoidable deaths. The 2022 Care Quality Commission report found that there were 155 such deaths in the two years preceding the report, and the NSFT’s own “Learning from Deaths” report admitted to 418 unexpected unnatural deaths in a four-year period. Many of those deaths were entirely avoidable suicides, some while directly in the NSFT’s care. Those numbers, even taken at face value, which is unfortunately hard to do given the trust’s record, are emblematic of what my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich South (Clive Lewis) aptly called the “slow-motion disaster” of mental health care. Secondly, there is the cruel detail of unrecorded or unaccounted deaths, which led to thousands of people falling through the gaps, left off official statistics and totted up retrospectively as if they were a mere glitch in the system—the dead dehumanised, lost and buried in spreadsheets. It is not right that, after facing allegations as serious as the NSFT has faced, it should be allowed to mark its on homework on the matter. But with a new Government comes an opportunity for a new approach. I therefore ask the Minister to meet me to discuss a pathway to justice and to change Suffolk’s mental health services. This is the crux of the debate. The families who have suffered so much deserve justice, and all my constituents deserve change. Those two things are inseparable—we simply cannot have one without the other—and there is no time to waste in delivering them.