Meeting of the Parliament 17 May 2023
Thank you very much, Deputy Presiding Officer.
As always with Audit Scotland reports, I am confident that the Government will read with interest and take on board the comments that are made.
We have seen historic increases in spending. It is a fact that the Scottish Government’s core mental health budget has more than doubled since 2020-21. There has been extraordinary work, some of it behind the scenes, by boards to clear long waits. In the past quarter alone, the number of children who were waiting for more than 52 weeks for child and adolescent mental health services decreased by 42 per cent, and the number who were waiting for more than 18 weeks decreased by 32 per cent. That unseen work has set the conditions for the most sustained, positive changes in CAMHS waiting lists for more than half a decade, and the number of children who started treatment from CAMHS in the most recent quarter is comfortably the highest figure on record.
As I mentioned, our focus cannot be just on specialist services. Over the past two years, we have invested £30 million to establish community-based mental health and wellbeing services for children, young people and their families. More than 45,000 people accessed those services between July and December last year, which reduced inappropriate referrals to specialist services. We have also invested £36 million in our communities mental health and wellbeing fund for adults over the past two years, and a further £15 million has been announced for 2023-24.
I will touch briefly on one specific part of the original motion, which Jackie Baillie raised in her opening speech. The motion refers to an increase in NHS 24 call volumes. Yes, calls are consistently up, but that is for a range of reasons. We have moved the mental health hub to a 24/7 service. More people know that the service exists, because we have signposted to it, as well as to a range of other supports, through our “Mind to Mind” website. It is not just about the volume of the calls but about how we respond to the calls.? We have backed NHS 24 with more than £9 million of funding since 2021 to ensure a quality service for everyone. I gently say that we should all take care to avoid using language that could stigmatise those who ask for help.
Are there areas where we need to make more progress more quickly? Yes—absolutely. We have exceeded our commitment to fund more than 800 additional mental health workers, many of whom are working in primary care and community settings, but we know that we need to further enhance the support that is available in primary care. We have had to make difficult decisions on the basis of our current financial situation, but that does not mean that that area is not still a priority.
More generally, we have signalled that, by the end of this parliamentary session, 10 per cent of NHS expenditure should be on mental health and 1 per cent should be on CAMHS.