---

Mental Health

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Neuberger, for obtaining this debate and for giving us an opportunity to raise a matter that is of considerable concern to many of us who are looking at different aspects, particularly the public service. I declare an interest as an adviser to the trustees of the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health. My advice is slightly differently pitched from that of the noble Baroness, because recently the Sainsbury centre has deliberately focused on two aspects. The first is the mental health of prisoners, and the second is the problems faced by those with mental health problems obtaining work: two areas that have been neglected for too long. Therefore, I was very glad to see this paper, which is in a way a precursor to the work of the problems of people getting work. Unless things are right for staff, nothing will be right for others. I will concentrate on the Prison Service as an example of a public service in which a great deal more could be done. It is right to say that there probably is no more stressful job in the United Kingdom than being a prison officer. I remember once watching a sex-offender treatment programme and marvelling at the tutors and what they were having to go through when they were role-playing with people who had committed the most awful crimes. They came out of that session literally shaking. One of them said to me that going through that work caused them to think twice when bathing their own children in the evening. That puts tremendous demands on staff; yet there was no proper support mechanism in the Prison Service for looking after those tutors, who were at the leading edge of doing the work of protecting the public on behalf of the community. In a way, the report is a wake-up call to the Prison Service to do a great deal more. We hear quite a lot about absenteeism in the Prison Service, and it varies from prison to prison. The interesting theme to me when inspecting prisons and looking at that was that there was a definite correlation between the management of a prison and absenteeism. It tells you quite a lot that if the management style is not right, people are not going to turn up for work. There are two workforces in prisons, and prisoners represent a huge mental health problem. There is an Office for National Statistics report that is worth referring to, in addition to those referred to in the Sainsbury centre paper. It was done in October 1998, and it is called Psychiatric Morbidity among Prisoners in England and Wales. It is still the most accurate document available. It shows that 70 per cent of those in prison suffer from some form of identifiable personality disorder. That does mean that they are certifiable, but that something is affecting their proposal. The reason why that is important and should not be lost sight of in this debate is well contained in a paper that I am very glad has been published today by the CBI, Getting Back on the Straight and Narrow. It proposes a better criminal justice system for all and amounts to a critique of a great deal of what the Government have not been doing. It wants them to do the central work that they say should be done—helping offenders to gain work, which is at the heart of the Government’s recent welfare-to-work programmes and helping the hardest-to-reach long-term unemployed, many of whom are ex-offenders. Unless there are programmes in place to get to the bottom of the mental health problems of those looking for work, you are affecting in many ways the whole of the workforce of the United Kingdom. While it is absolutely right to have the staff right, particularly in prisons, it is worth making certain that the workforce—in this case those seeking work—can be employed. The Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health’s report is extremely timely and the quality of the work that has been done by that centre has struck me ever since I first was in contact with it. I hope that the Minister can tell us that the Government are taking this seriously. This is not only a criticism, it is advice. I particularly like the five ““How can savings be delivered?”” points—recognition, prevention, awareness training, better access to health and effective rehabilitation—because they can be applied to many other aspects of improving all sorts of things in this country, not least the mental health of our workforce.