Like all parents of teenage children, I worry about them. About what they are exposed to online, their physical health and about pressures on their mental health. We know that healthy children make healthy families – that much is common sense – but we also know that if you want to know whether a country is going in the right or wrong direction, you need look no further than the nation’s children.
How we treat our children says so much about our priorities. The official, independent statistics don’t lie. When I first looked at them, I was angered and shocked by the story they told and it’s happening in plain sight.
The mental health of young people is a serious cause for concern, with 200,000 children waiting for mental health treatment, and many regularly skipping school. The number of children and young people admitted to hospital with an eating disorder increased by 90% in the five years up to 2021. The figure was up by over a third (35%) in 2021/22.
More children are becoming unhealthy, with two in every five leaving primary school overweight. But most damning of all, the number one reason for young children being admitted to hospital is to extract rotten teeth – because it is so difficult to get NHS dental treatment before tooth decay sets in. And incredibly, after 14 years of the Tories, the rise in life expectancy has stalled.
This is not the result of bad luck, but design. Not because the Tories wake up every day wanting to harm our children, but because of the inability of this government to form any kind of medium- or long-term strategy.
If parents treated their own children the way this government has treated the nation’s children, the word being used would be “neglect”. Our children are the biggest casualty of this kind of “sticking plaster” politics – a pattern of short-term patches when things have reached crisis point, rather than fixing the fundamentals.
Rishi Sunak’s refusal, when chancellor, to fund the Covid recovery plan for schools proposed by the Tories’ own recovery tsar is just one concrete example of the Tories failing to do their duty to the millions of children whose mental wellbeing suffered so much during lockdown. This is why change can’t come soon enough.
If we want to get our children’s future back, we need to rekindle our sense of ambition and to plan once more for the long term. It will require us to do things differently. That is what our national health mission is about – to get the NHS back on its feet by reforming the NHS and providing a new focus on prevention. To do so we need to bring the NHS closer to people and use the extraordinary developments in technology to treat patients more quickly and more effectively.
None of this will happen without a genuine and respectful partnership with professionals and parents to improve our children’s health. That’s why today, I am meeting patients, parents and professionals in the north-west as we publish Labour’s child health action plan.
First, it’s about getting children the care and support they need. It means saving children’s teeth, with a plan for dentistry that gives children access to more emergency appointments – 700,000 more appointments will be paid for by ending non-dom tax status for the super-rich. We will also introduce free breakfast clubs in every primary school so that every child gets a healthy meal to start the day.
Second, we need a generation of happier children. For the health of the country, we need to end the mental health crisis. Tackling problems early is essential. That’s why Labour will cut waiting lists for mental health treatment by putting 8,500 more mental health staff in the system. We will also introduce specialist mental health support for children in schools, delivering an open access mental health hub for every community.
Third, we need to do far more to prevent ill health. We can’t go on allowing vaping to be targeted at children and we will end the advertising of junk food before the 9pm watershed. We’ve also got to get all children doing physical activity in schools. This is a national imperative. Healthy, happy children is not something nice to have, it’s a basic right that has economic urgency. We want the next generation to be chasing their dreams, not a dentist’s appointment.
If we let children grow up overweight, with poor mental health and rotten teeth, we are not only harming their life chances, but adding a huge burden on the NHS and making the chances of delivering a more prosperous economy that much harder.
More than that, if health spending balloons to cope with an epidemic of poor health, there will never be any money for investment in our schools, roads and vital infrastructure.
I’ve talked about how Labour has changed and is back in service of working people, and today’s plan is another important building block in the development of a manifesto that will provide the hope the country needs and the future our children deserve. A vote for Labour will be a vote for national renewal, to make 2024 the year Britain’s politics changed fundamentally. We want a new politics, one that serves your interests and those of the next generation.
Our children’s future will be on the ballot paper at the election this year. So will the future of the NHS, and that election cannot come soon enough for me. In the coming months, I will be in every region of the country, sharing our plans and tapping into the expertise in every community. If elected, we plan to hit the ground running, to get Britain back on track.
Keir Starmer is leader of the Labour party and MP for Holborn and St Pancras
