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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now then, how does a teenager who needs mental health care end up in a police cell?  That’s a question that a senior policeman asked yesterday after he said he was left with no choice but to keep a 16 year old girl in custody in a police station.  Assistant Chief Constable, Paul Netherton, from Devon and Cornwall police, took to Twitter to vent his frustrations at the shortage of NHS bed for mental health patients, calling it unacceptable.  Well a bed was eventually found for the 16 year old but only after two days and a large amount of media attention.  Sarah Wollaston is a Conservative MP and Chair of the Health Select Committee and she joins me now from Dartmoor in Devon and very good to talk to you.  This must have come as no surprise to you as I’ve been reading articles you’ve written predicting just this very thing over a long period of time.  

SARAH WOLLASTON:  Absolutely.  We know that last year there were thirty children in Devon and Cornwall who unfortunately spent a night in a police cell, time in a police cell for no reason other than the fact that they were experiencing a mental health crisis.  Clearly it is unacceptable if it happens to anybody, adult or child, but it is particularly abhorrent that it happens to children and it must stop.  I’d like to see this made what is called a ‘never event’ in the NHS, that it puts it on a par with wrong site surgery because it’s absolutely the wrong place for anyone to be, in a police cell when they are in mental health crisis.  We would find it utterly unacceptable if this were a physical condition and we should feel the same about a mental health condition.

DM: But can it be done?  It’s got to be framed, a never event, it’s still got to be framed within the overall discussion on funding for the NHS.  There isn’t a bottomless pot here, can it be afforded within the current budget?

SARAH WOLLASTON:  Well it can be and it is very welcome that we have had the announcement of funding for fifty extra beds for Children and Adolescent Mental Health Services across the country but what we have to ask ourselves, for every child that ends up in an in-patient bed is could that have been prevented if more had been put into early intervention so that children are not coming into the system, if you like, when they are extremely unwell.  So it is extremely welcome to hear the injection of funding that is coming in today from the Chancellor, that will make a big difference.  

DM: Well we are hearing, we are also expecting to re-hear during the course of the Autumn Statement, that’s the way things go these days, two billion extra for the NHS and 1.1 billion or something like that coming from financial fines, fines on the banks, for GPs.  Given the specific area we are discussing, how will that make a difference?

SARAH WOLLASTON:  Well I think it will make a difference across the board.  Firstly, it seems there is going to be 1.5 billion which will be filling the gap that Simon Stevens and the Five Year Forward View has set out as being the gap that is opening up between what the NHS needs and what it has to spend at the moment but also on top of that, what’s called a Transformation Fund and that’s so important because you need what’s called double running, in other words if you are setting up a new service in the community for vital prevention work, you need to have that running at the same time as you have the resources there, if you like, the inpatient beds, so you can’t just close the beds without having the new service in place so I think that Transformation Fund is absolutely essential.  Also hearing that some of this might be going into investment in GP premises, all the kinds of things that are needed to stop people needing to go to casualty departments in the first place so trying to keep people looked after closer to home where possible, so things we’ve been talking about in the NHS for years so it’s really welcome, this transformation money, it will make a big difference.

DM: But that is the point isn’t it, it’s all jam tomorrow and as you say, you’ve been moaning about it for years, you mentioned there thirty children just in your area alone.  Will it really change, is there really an urgency about this or hasn’t this parliament just concentrated on this huge reorganisation of the NHS and issues like this have fallen down the cracks?  

SARAH WOLLASTON:  Oh no, I don't think so actually.  I think the gap in funding was going to open up whoever was in power and in fact if anything, the 12.7 billion extra that’s gone into the NHS over this spending round has actually kept us ahead of baseline inflation but unfortunately what it hasn’t done is met the growing demand.  We have an ageing population, many more of us are living with long term conditions, many more technologies coming into the NHS so we know that NHS inflation outstrips background inflation so it is really, the real consensus now around Simon Stephen’s plan for the NHS, this Five Year Forward view which is well worth looking at, it’s an excellent summary of the problems facing the NHS and the challenges for the future so I think what George Osborne’s done is actually in responding directly to that request from Simon Stephens, the Head of the NHS, I think this is the way forward because this was one of the central points about the Health and Social Care Act was it, if you like, transferred all the micromanagement of the NHS away from politicians and to the NHS itself, so we have real clinical leadership around the way this money is spent so I think what we’re now seeing is the positive benefits of that.  Let’s give the money to the NHS, let’s have clinical leadership in how it’s spent and I’m confident that one of the things they will prioritise in that is mental health services because particularly Children’s and Adolescent Mental Health Services have been underfunded for far too long.

DM: Okay, Sarah Wollaston, we must end it there, thank you very much for your thoughts.  

SARAH WOLLASTON:  Thank you very much.