Chamber and committees

Can I just clarify something for the record? We spoke at the beginning of the meeting about the £29.9 million cut, which would have an effect on primary care services and community link workers as part of that whole network. Are those community link worker positions protected from the likely cuts that are coming down the track?

I will take us back to one of the fundamentals that we have discussed a few times this morning. Do you believe that NHS boards are on track to meet the target of 10 per cent of all front-line spending being on mental health services?

In other words, that might mean a shift from some areas of current expenditure in acknowledgment that mental health is a growing issue that should be a central part of the national health service’s work, perhaps in a way in which it has not historically been a part.

Yes. To go back to a point that Graham Simpson made earlier, we recognise that some of the data is required for management purposes, but the committee would strongly support the maximum amount of data being in the public domain so that people can understand what is going on and follow implementation of the policy and delivery of outcomes.

We have come to the end of our evidence session. I thank Alistair Cook, Gavin Gray and Caroline Lamb for being with us this morning. In particular, I thank you for coming to the committee room. Quite a few of our evidence sessions have been with people who have joined us remotely, which is not always easy. You might be surprised to learn that technology sometimes fails, although, on the whole, we have had really good evidence sessions.

Thank you very much for the time that you have given us this morning and for being so willing to answer the questions that we have put to you.

The main item for the committee is agenda item 2, which is further consideration of the joint Accounts Commission and Audit Scotland report on adult mental health.

We have already held a series of round-table evidence sessions, as well as having a session with the Auditor General and his team. This morning, we are pleased to welcome witnesses from the Scottish Government to give us their response to the evidence that we have already taken and to answer some of the questions that we have.

I am pleased that we are joined by the accountable officer, Caroline Lamb, who is the chief executive of NHS Scotland and the director general of health and social care in the Scottish Government. Alongside the accountable officer, we have Gavin Gray, who is the deputy director of improving mental health services, and Dr Alastair Cook, who is the principal medical officer in the mental health division of the Scottish Government.

Before we get to our questions, I invite Caroline Lamb to make a short opening statement.

You also spoke of financial challenges. We will get to those in more detail in the course of the meeting, but I have a question about the announcement in the past couple of weeks of another in-year budget cut to mental health services, which follows on from the in-year cut announced as a result of the emergency budget review last November, which was of the order of £38 million. The cut this year is £29.9 million.

The joint report states:

“Increasing the availability of mental health and wellbeing services in primary care could help to prioritise prevention and early intervention and decrease pressure on specialist services.”

How will the recently announced cuts, which include a reprofiling of mental health and primary care programmes, impact on those services?

So, what spend has been postponed—I think that that was the expression used in the letter to the Finance and Public Administration Committee—from the mental health transformation fund?

Is there not a bit of an implementation gap? The Government’s stated position is that it will increase mental health funding by 25 per cent and that 10 per cent of all NHS front-line spending will be on mental health, but things seem to be going backwards, not forwards, on both fronts.

We will get on to data and evidence shortly.

One of the clear recommendations of the report that we are discussing concerns the fact that there is a great inequality in the impact of mental ill health. In one of the evidence sessions, we considered the impact on the minority ethnic community and other marginalised groups. Will taking money out of the mental health services budget not also have a disproportionately unequal impact on the communities that are most marginalised and probably most dependent on mental health services?

There is a joint Convention of Scottish Local Authorities-Scottish Government mental health and wellbeing strategy that refers to the specific needs of minority ethnic groups. However, during the course of our inquires, we have been told that there is no action in the accompanying delivery plan to provide culturally sensitive mental health services. Can you explain why that is?