The Tories said they cared about child mental health – but the Budget implies the exact opposite

It was only a week ago that my colleague Jon Goldin made a powerful case for ring-fencing national funding for child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS). Today’s Budget would suggest that message has not been heard by the Government.

CAMHS has long been the “Cinderella” service in the NHS. Children and young people with mental illness are some of the most vulnerable individuals in our society but they do not have a voice. As our research at the Royal College of Psychiatrists has shown, it is all too easy for funds that should have been directed to young people to be diverted elsewhere, with some areas spending less than £10 per child on mental health care.

Without protection of funds and ongoing additional investment, how are we to achieve the expectation from Government that we transform services, improve productivity and provide a “seamless” service for children and young people?

And we need to improve efficiency. There is no doubt that there is a variability in service provision which needs to be urgently addressed, however there is also no doubt that demand for CAMHS has soared while the workforce is shrinking. For example, while hospital admissions for self harm in children and adolescents in England increased by 50 per cent between 2005 and 2015, numbers of CAMHS psychiatrists continue to fall year on year.

These young people are in distress right now. They are our future generation of parents who need to be healthy and resilient to bring up the next generation of children. They are also the future generation that will be our workforce and build our economy. As the recent Stevenson-Farmer independent review into workplace mental health showed, poor mental health costs the UK economy between £74bn and £99bn a year.

We need to invest in our young people now for tomorrow. The teenager who has just been brought to A&E for trying to hang themselves can’t wait; the child in care who has been repeatedly abused and has been pushed from pillar to post can’t wait; nor can all the child Xs out there who cannot get a service without the intervention of a high court judge.

As the Chancellor confirmed today, a green paper setting out the Government’s plans to transform CAMHS is set to be published in December.

This paper comes almost 20 years after Every Child Matters was published – a Government report intended to bring a sea change in children’s services, including substantial investment in CAMHS. But in recent years, children’s mental health has received less than 1 per cent of the overall health budget, although, as children grow into adults, mental health problems account for 23 per cent of disease burden in the UK. Many affected children remain invisible because they are not in contact with services.

The Prime Minister now has a golden opportunity to finally take this work forward and honour the commitment she made to help our children and young people when she took office.

This could be one of the most important legacies of her term which will reach far into the future. The alternative, as Wendy Burn, President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists said in response to today’s Budget, would be a “catastrophic betrayal” of today’s youth.

Bernadka Dubicka is Chair of the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Faculty at the Royal College of Psychiatrists