ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO SKY NEWS, SUNDAY WITH NIALL PATERSON

NIALL PATERSON: Theresa May promised to transform the treatment of mental health but today four in ten child mental health services are deemed to be failing with some children waiting 18 months for treatment. Joining me now from Hereford is the Health Minister Philip Dunne, a very good morning to you.

PHILIP DUNNE: Good morning, Niall.

NP: Theresa May has today published an article in the Sunday Express which to my eyes looks a carbon copy of the promises she made on this programme at the beginning of the year, identifying mental health care provision as an area of concern. Since January, what has she done?

PHILIP DUNNE: Well at the beginning of the year as you know she made it very clear that one of her priorities is to put mental health on the same footing as physical health in terms of the parity of esteem and the way in which people who suffer mental health get treated and we’ve done a great deal to try to start implementing that promise so this week, this last week, Paul Farmer who is the Chief Executive of MIND, the mental health charity and Lord Stephenson, who has been a mental health campaigner in the House of Lords, published a report that was commissioned by the Prime Minister to encourage businesses and organisations, starting with the NHS and the Civil Service, to provide much greater awareness, support and commitment to help people with mental health conditions in the workplace.

NP: And when those recommendations are implemented and have had time to bed in, we’ll have you back on the show and we can discuss them but literally, from the beginning of this year, what improvements have you made to mental health care provision?

PHILIP DUNNE: We have made a commitment on the finances, we’ve increased the money spent on mental health last year by over £500 million, we have a commitment to invest over a billion pounds over the next four years, we published the Mental Health Workforce plan to help deliver improvements to achieve many of the targets that we’ve also added into the mental health system, so we are planning 21,000 additional posts in mental health over the next four years as well as setting targets for psychosis, for children being seen, in a way that … well for psychosis we’ll be the first country in the world to have set a target for six weeks access to talking therapies.

NP: It isn’t as if the NHS has just woken up to the idea of a lack of mental health care provision, 23% of NHS activity goes towards mental health but just 11% of the budget, so extra money is fantastic, great, all the rest of it but it is a drop in the ocean next to that which is required.

PHILIP DUNNE: Well as I’ve said, we’re increasing the funding going in to mental health services by about 10% in real terms over the course of the next few years so it’s …

NP: I’m sorry, just on that point though, isn’t the NHS budget due to rise by 0.7% next year which actually in real terms is a cut?

PHILIP DUNNE: No, it’s going to go up in real terms per capita over this year, we pledged that quite clearly in our manifesto and we are increasing by eight billion over the course of the parliament and over the last two years it’s gone up by 5% so there has been a significant increase in resources, we are obviously just ahead of the budget and we’ll see what that will mean for coming years through the budget discussions but priority has been given to mental health …

NP: Nobody will deny that the government is finally starting to get to grips with mental health or at least trying to get to grips but two measures from the Care Quality Commission show that since 2010 this government really has taken its eye off the ball. The number of people who had to travel outside their own area for mental health care rose between 2014/15 and 2015/16 by 40%. The number of detentions under the Mental Health Act has risen by a fifth in two years. Up till this point would you concede that you got it wrong on mental health?

PHILIP DUNNE: As you know, we have had a number of challenges and priorities to deal with over the last few years. I think the focus following the Mid Staffs report in 2012 was that we had some real patient safety issues across our hospitals in physical health and there was a priority given to raising staff levels of nurses in particular in our wards which have gone up by close to 11,000 since 2010 and mental health was one of the areas which saw a reduction during that period in nurses and that’s what we’re now trying to put right. It does take time, it takes time to train people to undertake these very challenging roles and that’s why we are committing both the resource and the workforce plan to recruit more therapists, more doctors, more nurses, into the mental health community.

NP: Let’s speak more generally about the NHS as a whole for a second. You raised the matter of staffing there and it appears that you have got some very real problems. It is great that you are looking to secure people for these positions but you don’t appear to be finding them. NHS England in March, 30,600 full time equivalent positions advertised, that’s up from 26,000 just the year before. The problems in terms of staffing within the health service are not getting better, on your metrics they are getting worse.

PHILIP DUNNE: Well no, what I think I’d point you to are the requirements for more staffing to make sure that our hospital wards are safe and that’s one of the reasons why last month the Secretary of State made it very clear he wants to increase the number of nurses in training for the NHS of the future by a record amount, by 25% starting next year. So there will be more than 5000 additional training places for nurses on top of the additional 25% increase in doctor training posts that were announced the year before, so we absolutely recognise we need more staff in our hospitals, in primary care, helping cope with the growing demand that we have from an aging population.

NP: It does strike sometimes that whenever we talk about the health service, no matter the political view of the individual that we talk to, it is always about what we are going to do going forward, not about what has happened up to this point. Can we just dwell for a second on targets within the NHS? They are now failed en masse across the service. In 2012/13 86% of time related targets were hit, that fell to 0% in 2016/17.

PHILIP DUNNE: We are under considerable pressure in the NHS at the moment because of growing demand as a result of the aging population, the fact that we’re living longer with more complex conditions, nobody is trying to deny that or hide that. What we have to do is to ensure that we have got more people coming into the system to provide the care that’s so urgently needed and to look at the way in which we provide care. One of the comments that the Chief Medical Officer for NHS England, Sir Rhys Kier, was talking about today was to ensure that we have one of the safest systems in the world. That is the ambition of the Secretary of State, that’s one of the reasons why we’ve set up the Healthcare Safety Investigations branch in order to provide greater ability for the health service across the country to react when things go wrong and learn from mistakes. So it is a combination of providing more financial resource, more human resource and doing things better and more safely in order to try and get better outcomes for patients, that is the objective.

NP: Mr Dunne, I wonder if we could move on to allegations of abuse in and around the Palace of Westminster. We are told in the Sunday Times that the Prime Minister is receiving a weekly briefing on the indiscretions of her back benchers, should that information be made public?

PHILIP DUNNE: I think that’s a report that I don’t recognise. What the Prime Minister has done today is to ask the Cabinet Office to investigate whether or not allegations that have been made about a colleague are in breach of the Ministerial Code and …

NP: You worked in the Whips Office for a length of time, Mr Dunne, you’re not telling me that the Whips don’t have information on their back benchers that they then use to get them to vote in a particular way?

PHILIP DUNNE: You are right, I was in the Whips Office and when I was in the Whips Office it was very clear that anything in the Whips Office stays in the Whips Office.

NP: And you think that’s appropriate?

PHILIP DUNNE: There are allegations made about colleagues from across parties…there are allegations made about colleagues on all kinds of things which come to the attention of the Whips, some of them are true, some of them may not be true and where there is …

NP: And they should be the arbiter of whether or not it’s true? We appear to have gone through the Looking Glass here, there are allegations being made to the Whips Office that they sit on and they arbitrate upon.

PHILIP DUNNE: What I was going on to say is that if there are any allegations of inappropriate behaviour or illegal behaviour, clearly they get acted upon. What the Prime Minister has also done today is write to Speaker Bercow to ask him to set up a cross-party parliamentary procedure to enable members of staff who feel that they are being harassed or bullied to have a place to go which is independent of their employer and I think that is entirely appropriate and I think we need to get on and put that in place and one of the things that …

NP: Mr Dunne, we are coming to the end of our time but you appear to be making the same point that Owen Paterson made a few moments ago which is that there is a difference between improper behaviour and illegal behaviour so I just want to ask you a few yes/no questions. Would you ever send explicit sexual texts to someone who had applied for a job in your office?

PHILIP DUNNE: Do you know what, I think that is a completely inappropriate question, of course the answer is no but I don't think we should be going down that …

NP: It is completely inappropriate behaviour and Mr ?? has admitted to it. Would you ever send your parliamentary staff to go and buy sex toys for you?

PHILIP DUNNE: This is not somewhere where I am prepared to get into these conversations. Of course I don’t do that, I have never done that kind of activity and I don’t condone it but I don't think it’s appropriate to have trial by media, trying to pin allegations until they are proven.

NP: It’s not trial by media, the latter allegation has been admitted. Where in the Ministerial Code is that kind of behaviour covered?

PHILIP DUNNE: If it’s not covered in the Code, the Code needs to be revised, I accept that.

NP: I just want to pick up on comments made by Michael Gove yesterday because in terms of the egregiousness spectrum those were pretty much at the far end. His joke, ‘Sometimes I think that coming into the studio with you, John Humphreys, is a bit like going into Harvey Weinstein’s bedroom, you just pray that you emerge with your dignity intact.’ The Environment Secretary there saying that women who have been abused, who have suffered through no fault of their own a degradation in their own dignity.

PHILIP DUNNE: I don't think it is appropriate to make light of these kinds of sexual harassment claims regarding public figures, I agree that is not appropriate.

NP: The problem is though, Mr Dunne, is when these things happen, a full apology is issued, we simply move on and we’re supposed to forget about it but it is illustrative isn’t it, that we have had not the Environment Secretary but the former leader of the Labour party, Lord Kinnock, weighing in as well, making jokes when the spotlight is on everyone in public life around allegations of impropriety.

PHILIP DUNNE: I think the spotlight in this country has been on people in public life since the exposures about Jimmy Savile took place and I think all organisations need to look at themselves and how they conduct themselves when they are speaking to the public wherever it happens to be, whether it’s in politics or ordinary …

NP: I am so sorry Mr Dunne, we have to leave it there.