Whole-Person Mental Health: Care, Choice, Community, and Combatting Populism

Chair: Cllr Nick da Costa (Chair, FCC); Aide: Jess Brown-Fuller MP; Hall Aide: Jennie Rigg

Submitted by: Federal Policy Committee
Mover: Helen Morgan MP (Spokesperson for Health and Social Care).
Summation: Dr Mohsin Khan (Chair of the Policy Working Group).

1. Decades of Liberal Democrat campaigning have pushed Britain's mental health services forward and positively shaped how we as a nation think about mental health.
2. There is a danger that the dismissive language of the far right has begun to undo the progress we made by reintroducing stigma and shame into conversations about mental health.
3. Labour's recent record is particularly alarming, and their decision to scrap mental health targets reflects a dangerous retreat from treating mental health as a distinct and urgent policy area.
4. The pandemic has transformed both the scale and visibility of the crisis, and that it amplified loneliness, anxiety, and grief, and pushed NHS, local authority and school staff harder than ever before.

Conference believes that:

1. Anyone can experience mental illness, through no fault of their own, so everyone must be able to access timely diagnosis, treatment and ongoing support.
2. Resources in our mental health services too often only kick in at the point of crisis.
3. An individual's mental health journey is deeply personal, so their treatment programme should be too.
4. Families and communities play a crucial role in the lives of people with mental illness, either as a source of resilience or stress. They also bear a lot of the burden of supporting them and helping them make sense of decisions on offer.
5. Liberal Democrat policies are based on scientific evidence and lived experience, especially in a time of rising scepticism towards mental health and of new and developing treatments.
6. A healthier NHS workforce would have more time and capacity to diagnose and treat mental illness.
7. Services should be designed in a way that means anyone who needs them can access them, irrespective of age, class, gender, income, ethnicity, or postcode.

Conference therefore endorses policy paper 163, Whole-Person Mental Health: Care, Choice, Community, and Combatting Populism, with its approach based on six key principles:

1. Accessibility.
2. Fairness and equity.
3. Personal choice and autonomy.
4. Being community-centred.
5. Being led by evidence.
6. Caring for the people that take care of us.

In particular, Conference welcomes its proposals to:

1. Ensure that as few people as possible develop mental ill-health by:
   1. Offering regular mental health check-ups for people, and those supporting them, when they are most vulnerable to mental ill-health.
   2. Ensuring that all mental health services are integrated with money advice, substance abuse, housing and employment advice services by default, and widening access to services that provide temporary protection from problem debt.
   3. Introducing structural reforms to both the National Curriculum and Ofcom to empower children and parents to use social media in a way that is right for their family, whilst being protected from the risk of mental harm.
   4. Requiring social media apps to introduce cigarette-style health warnings for under-18s.
   5. Tripling the budget of the Farmer Welfare Fund, which would provide greater mental health support and services at livestock markets and county shows, and offering additional mental health support following Rural Payment Agency visits.
   6. Restoring the £2 bus fare cap, and supporting local authorities to use powers to franchise services and simplify funding so that affordable bus routes can be restored or new routes added where there is local need, to reduce rural isolation and loneliness.
2. Make it easier to access mental health services, and quicker to receive a diagnosis and treatment, by:
   1. Supporting digital-enabled therapies, if there is enough evidence for them, and if patients retain the choice to opt for more traditional treatments.
   2. Making it easier for world-class experts to do essential mental health research in the UK, and for them to conduct crucial research that helps build our evidence base.
   3. Opening a walk-in Young People's Mental Health Hub in every community, with specific support for children that have fallen between school and CAMHS support.
   4. Removing the arbitrary cliff edge at 18 for young people's mental health services.
   5. Enshrining the 'no wrong door' principle into law across mental health and related services, to ensure that no one will be turned away or told to start again elsewhere.
   6. Making mental health referral and support services available following every miscarriage, not just after three, and introducing annual reporting on waiting times for these patients.
3. Prevent people with mental illnesses, and those around them, from shouldering the unfair mental and financial costs associated with mental illness by:
   1. Making prescriptions for people with chronic mental health conditions free on the NHS.
   2. Introducing a legal duty on health professionals to identify family members and unpaid carers, and to consider their own health and support needs as part of routine care.
   3. Preventing insurers from discriminating against people with mental health conditions when the risk is unrelated, by requiring fairer underwriting and oversight from the Financial Conduct Authority.
4. Reform the Mental Health Act to protect individual liberties and ensure that mental health professionals have the support they need to deliver appropriate care by:
   1. Creating a statutory, independent Mental Health Commissioner to represent patients, their families and carers, and introduce a new Veterans' Mental Health Oversight Officer.
   2. Working with healthcare regulators to provide additional, appropriate safeguards on the use of digital monitoring technologies, where needed.
   3. Ensuring that all police forces have a mental health professional in the control room at all times.
   4. Implement the recommendations of the Wessely Review appropriately to ensure that people of black African or Caribbean heritage are no longer more likely to be detained under the Mental Health Act than white people.

Applicability: England only.

Mover and summation combined: 16 minutes; mover and summation of amendments: 4 minutes; all other speakers: 3 minutes. For eligibility and procedure for speaking in this debate, see pages 15-16 of the agenda. You can submit a speaker's card online here.

In addition to speeches from the platform, voting members will be able to make concise (maximum one-minute) interventions from the floor during the debate on the motion. See pages 14 and 16 of the agenda for further information

The deadline for amendments to this motion is 13.00 Monday 2 March; you can submit amendments online here, see page 13 of the agenda for more information. Those selected for debate will be printed in Conference Extra and Saturday’s Conference Daily. The deadline for requests for separate votes is 09.00 Thursday 12 March; you can request separate votes here, see page 14 of the agenda for more information.