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Mental Health: Out-of-Area Placements

It is a great pleasure to be able to raise a very important issue for debate, albeit three hours earlier than expected. It is good to see the Minister for Community and Social Care taking his seat.

I want to raise an issue of profound importance. It is a practice which I think is intolerable but which carries on every week of the year and probably every day of the year: the shunting of people around the country, sometimes a long distance away from home, at a moment of mental health crisis. Typically, someone at a moment of acute crisis would be taken into hospital but there would be no bed available for them, so they would be taken away somewhere else in the country. There are numerous stories of people being taken hundreds of miles away from home on a regular basis.

Such practice would never be tolerated in physical health services. Let us imagine, for example, someone who had had a stroke or with a heart condition being taken by ambulance and being told, “I’m sorry, there’s no room at the local hospital. We’re taking you to Cumbria from Norfolk.” It would be an outrage. It would be regarded as a scandal, so it does not happen—yet it happens every week of the year in mental health. I regard that as discrimination at the heart of our NHS and it is one of the very many examples of how people who suffer from acute mental ill health are disadvantaged by the system.

Incidentally, I make no criticism of any individual Government; this practice always happened, but there has been a rise in the number of instances, which I will come to in a little while. In many ways, someone suffering from mental ill health does not get the same right of access to treatment at a moment of need as someone with a physical health problem. If any of us in the Chamber stopped and thought about it for a moment, we would conclude that we cannot begin to justify that, and that there must be a programme designed to achieve genuine equality of access to support at that moment of need.