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Labour Must Go the Distance on Preventing Poor Mental Health

Labour Must Go the Distance on Preventing Poor Mental Health

As today marks World Mental Health Day, this op-ed from the Mental Health Foundation details how this new Labour government has the potential to make a lasting impact on the mental wellbeing of the nation.

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Alexa Knight

Director of England at the Mental Health Foundation

Labour have started focusing on preventing poor mental health before it happens, but we need to see that rhetoric turn into action.

The UK’s Mental Health Landscape

While the UK’s difficulties in addressing poor mental health are decades long, in the years since Covid-19 the situation has drastically deteriorated. Combined with a decade of austerity which hit local authorities’ public health budgets hard, it’s little wonder that we’re all doing our best to simply keep afloat in the middle of a mental health crisis. But could the end be in sight?

The effects of this crisis are playing out live in front of us: nearly 2 million people are on mental health waiting lists, with millions more across the country who’d benefit from support but don’t qualify for NHS help. Hundreds of thousands of people with mental health problems are too unwell to return to work, because they aren not getting proper support. The societal and economic cost of poor mental health is a staggering £117.9 billion every year.

Far too often, we fail to adequately support people’s health – particularly their mental health – until they’re already seeking support from the NHS. In 2023, we spent £239bn on healthcare, but only about £3.5bn on preventative public health measures. For mental health in particular, the situation is even worse, receiving only about 3% of that £3.5bn.

Moving Towards Prevention

This is why it’s been so refreshing to hear the new Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, and Secretary of State for Health, Wes Streeting, talk more about prevention. The 2024 Labour manifesto promised to “change the NHS so that it becomes not just a sickness service, but able to prevent ill heath in the first place.” Following the Darzi review, prevention became one of the government’s key focuses for restoring the NHS from its ‘broken but not beaten’ state.

This preventative approach needs to run through every element of our society. For example, in the workplace, an organisation might implement training to make sure their workforce is trauma-informed. This involves enabling employees to effectively listen to and value people’s experiences by creating safe spaces to talk, by showing an understanding of the traumas people have lived through, and by responding to their needs without creating new traumas.

The new government could support this by introducing a trauma-informed workforce programme for England, similar to that which is being delivered in Scotland. This could be implemented as part of the upcoming Workers’ Rights Bill, and would provide employers with the information needed to implement this approach. With poor mental health costing UK employers £51 billion a year, these sorts of approaches make perfect sense for the government to be including in its growth agenda.

On a wider scale, Labour could truly commit to a preventative approach by restoring the public health grant – the pot of ring-fenced funding given to local authorities to prevent ill-health. Since 2015, the grant has been cut by more than £1 billion in real terms. This has severely restricted what local councils can offer when it comes to prevention.

We also need dedicated, specific, and protected funding for public mental health interventions that we know are effective. The government could achieve this by creating a specific funding stream for preventative work, called PDEL (Preventative Departmental Expenditure Limits,) which has been championed by cross-party think tank Demos. This would sit alongside the current ‘Capital’ and ‘Resource’ Departmental Expenditure Limits, and would not only protect funding for prevention, but it would entrench the necessity of it in the minds of civil service policymakers. A change like this could be revolutionary for Whitehall thinking.

Councils and the devolved nations would also benefit from longer term settlements, to allow them to better plan their priorities for prevention while knowing the money is still coming down the line. This has proved increasingly difficult with the current short settlements as health challenges worsened by Covid and the cost-of-living crisis have developed.

A Happier End in Sight

The benefits to society of delivering a truly preventative approach to mental health would be immense. We could reduce pressure on mental health services, allowing them to finally reduce the waiting lists, as well as on our benefits system. Workplaces and society as a whole could become more healthy and more productive. But most importantly, we will stop people suffering with mental health problems which could have easily been prevented.

We’ve seen the shoots of a really promising approach on preventing poor mental health from the new government. Now, they must water those shoots until they bloom.

To learn more about Curia’ s Health, Care and Life Sciences Research group, please email team@curiauk.com.

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