In July 2024, the General Election landed us with a new Labour Government. Shortly after the election results, Wes Streeting was appointed as Secretary of State (SoS) for Health and Social Care. This means that Streeting leads the Government’s department responsible for healthcare, including mental health.
Our CEO Mandy Crandale has today written to Wes Streeting, outlining three areas we think should be a priority for this new Government, and inviting his department to meet with us. This letter builds on the piece we wrote ahead of the General Election, which set out the actions we think a successful Government would need to take to achieve mental health justice.
Our letter outlines three key areas we feel the Government needs to focus on in order to improve care for those living with mental ill-health, distress, and trauma.
In the letter, we call for the Government to.
- Prioritise care: This goes beyond increasing staff numbers and decreasing wait times. Ensuring more people have access to harmful care is not enough. Instead, the Government must work to challenge abuse and stigma within the mental health system. In particular, we must move away from austerity policies that position patients as problems, and resist private, for-profit “innovations” that promise to improve care while saving money.
- Ensure healthcare for all: This Government must recognise how those who are most harmed by the mental health system are also most likely to be subject to conditions that produce and exacerbate mental ill-health in the first place. In particular, we urged Streeting to:
- Protect trans people’s right to healthcare – including halting policy changes based on the highly controversial Cass Review, and ceasing to implement single-sex spaces policies.
- Immediately resume the reform of the Mental Health Act, recognising how racialised people are disproportionately detained under the current legislation.
- Abandon welfare reforms proposed by the previous Government, which use Disabled people as a scapegoat for failing economic policy.
- Achieve meaningful co-production: Finally, we invite the Government to meaningfully co-produce their work. This goes far beyond ensuring people with lived experience can “have a say” on issues that are already pre-decided. The Government must also commit to working with smaller, user-led organisations, rather than focussing solely on large-scale mental health charities.
At NSUN, we are hopeful that a Labour Government may help to bring about mental health justice. It is not clear exactly how and whether they will do so, but we remain open to dialogue. We look forward to hearing back from Streeting and his department.