Andrew Dismore

Dear editor,

The news that Barnet, Enfield and Haringey Mental  Health  Trust is  in trouble and facing  a CQC inspection this month  which is likely to designate it as ‘inadequate’ is as unwelcome as it is not unexpected,  given the scale of their problems that have lasted for so long. The Trust has lurched from one crisis to another, and it is regrettable that it has taken BBC’s Panorama to expose the true scale of these  problems, with scarce resources having to be used on expensive non NHS facilities  because the NHS doesn’t have the capacity to  cope.

This funding crisis illustrates just some of  the human cost of austerity and must be resolved  by the Conservative Government fast- yet we have not heard a peep about it from any of the  Borough’s three Conservative MPs.

The funding gap  is of course extremely serious for the patients concerned, but as our NHS mental  health services come under increasing pressure, so those pressures  spread out beyond the NHS. They impact on other services, especially  the Police who are spending  increasing amounts of officer time and effort on responding to the needs of those with mental health  conditions  who have been failed by   the NHS in not getting the  treatment they need.

With the Met. reportedly facing yet more cuts of £1billion, and of such  a scale that the Metropolitan   Police Commissioner  has publically protested  and predicted the Met will lose thousands of officers and will have to reduce its response services, it is not  sustainable that the  consequences of the NHS’s financial shortfalls  are passed on to  them.

Andrew Dismore

Labour London Assembly Member for Barnet and Camden