Assessing the government’s plans for new Neighbourhood Mental Health Centres

We were thrilled to see the announcement earlier this month that new Neighbourhood Mental Health Centres (NMHC) will be opening across England.

This follows the success of six pilot sites that opened last year which tried and tested this community-based model in which people struggling with mental health problems can get walk-in specialist and holistic support without a referral and without a months-long wait.

Using the £473m pot of funding that the government announced in the Spring, regional health systems will be able to re-organise mental health services and wider holistic services – including advice and support with money – to offer an approach to care that is underpinned by citizenship. This means recognising that recovering from mental illness often takes more than medication and psychotherapy (although that’s important too), but also having something meaningful to do in the day; somewhere to live; someone to love, and crucially, some money in our pockets to pay the bills and participate in society.

We’ve previously seen this work with our own eyes, when we made the trip to our local Barnsley Street Neighbourhood Mental Health Centre. Here, having access to a drop-in Citizens Advice welfare worker twice a week has helped people using the centre to access an additional £100,000 worth of benefits.

Our research has proven time and time again that financial problems are an underlying driver of mental health conditions. We have found that people with mental health problems are three times more likely to worry about being able to afford enough food than those without such conditions.

To be clear, the announcement earlier this month wasn’t about new money. Instead, it was all about the appetite and ambition that regional health systems (specifically,  Integrated Care Boards) have to make this model the new status quo.

When the government announced this £473 million capital funding pot in the Spring, we had some concerns that the ICBs could use it for any number of priority initiatives, such as eliminating out-of-area placements, modernising facilities, expanding mental health emergency departments, developing crisis houses – alongside the NMHCs. So, at the time, with no specific ring-fenced funding dedicated to the NMHC model, we were worried it might fall down the priority list.

But, thankfully, it seems like that has been avoided. ICBs seem genuinely convinced this is the best way forward for mental healthcare, not just for people with severe mental health diagnoses but also for those with longer term or more complex needs.

So we’re excited to be working with the government, and other stakeholders like the Money and Pensions Service the UK’s biggest commissioner of money advice) to support ICBs use this moment to embed access to money advice from the start.

This is ‘capital’ funding – a start-up pot to get things going – which pays for the physical assets and infrastructure like the building, any medical equipment and set up needed, or new digital systems that make the integration possible. This is in contrast to ‘revenue’ funding that covers the day-to-day operational running costs (such as staff salaries, medicines, and electricity).

Capital is a fundamentally important part of creating new NMHCs, since a key aspect of it is about re-engineering the mental health service landscape in an area – bringing together different services, systems and professions that might otherwise work in silos or behind closed doors in different hospital departments, to bring them all under one roof.

While this good news is worth celebrating, we must also acknowledge that mental health services are desperately underfunded, and that record numbers of people are contacting the NHS for mental health support.

It was, however, welcome to see new Prime Minister Andy Burnham, in his Mirror article announcing this, recognising the scale of the mental health crisis and the need to expand services to get people the support they need. We believe the neighbourhood mental health model is a vital way of providing that support.