Tory Party Conference: Former minister bemoans 'battles' with NHS over CAMHS funding
Neil Puffett
Tuesday, October 4, 2016
The government has had "battles" with the NHS to ensure money set aside for transforming children's mental health services is not spent on other things, a former health minister has revealed.
Alistair Burt, who resigned as health minister in July, said that, amid pressure on health budgets, the NHS had been keen to divert money intended for child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) to other service areas.
As part of efforts to transform CAMHS, the government announced in March 2015 that it would pump £1.25bn into services by 2020.
"There was some sense in the NHS that if it hadn't been spent they could absorb the money that hadn't been spent and start afresh the next year," Burt said at a fringe meeting hosted by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham.
"I said ‘no - we have to have a clear commitment that every single penny of the £1.25bn has to be spent'. There were some battles, [but] it's been agreed. It will be spent."
He added that there were also attempts to "stretch" the timescale for spending the money.
"[They wanted to know] was it a commitment to spend it during the course of this parliament or was it by 2020, which included financial year 2020/21?" Burt said.
"I said ‘no'. Eventually I adopted the tactic that I just said things from the dispatch box and said ‘this is so', because I knew that if I said it then we would be had up if we didn't live up to the commitment. It was the only way to do it.
Burt, MP for North East Bedfordshire, said he also experienced issues with getting money earmarked for perinatal mental health spent on services.
"The first year, it couldn't all be spent," Burt said.
"NHS England wanted to take it. I had to have a serious conversation with a senior officer in the NHS because they told me the money couldn't be rolled over. We had a struggle about this.
"I think what that illustrates is that the pressures on the system are very, very tight and accordingly, if there is spare money, it will be used for other things.
"When it comes to clinical commissioning groups and that sort of thing, we have got to keep a very sharp eye on what they do, because there are difficulties with levers."
Burt said the NHS system is "so devolved", that ministers "can't do everything they would like to do" because they don't have direct control.
"Ministers can cajole, and persuade, and talk, but we don't control every item of expenditure, because that's the system under which we work," he said.
Burt also defended the government for handing £143m of the total £1.25bn over to services in 2015/16, the first year that additional funding became available, when it was expected that £250m would be invested.
"Although things had risen up the agenda - and although we were making commitments, you couldn't just pull a lever and make things happen overnight," Burt said.
"An awful lot of this, and it's still the case, is therefore a plea for a bit of space for those who followed after me in order to get personnel into place in order to train people, to build facilities - it does need a bit of time."
Burt also expressed concerns about inaction on cases involving individual children due to different structures in the NHS.
"There are real frustrations about getting things done in the system," he said.
"If the NHS doesn't want to do something, it just doesn't happen. There is a sclerosis that needs to be challenged."
