Mental health services for children in Lewisham receive two thirds of the NHS funding Camden does – despite Camden having two thirds the number of young people.  

Councillor Chris Barnham, cabinet member for school performance and children’s services, told a children and young people select committee the statistic last week while discussing a report on child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) waiting times. 

Caroline Hirst, manager of the children’s joint commissioning team, said there are “conversations happening with the CCG about investment levels”.  

She told the select committee: “We’ve undertaken some benchmarking and there is an underinvestment compared to national benchmarking, which puts us in a difficult position because we are scrutinised quite heavily around things like waiting times and access and we’re not performing as well as we want to in those areas.” 

In October last year, 96 young people were waiting more than 52 weeks after being referred to CAMHS, compared to five in Croydon, 11 in Lambeth and one in Southwark. 

But after funding from NHS England, introducing a Lewisham CAMHS Service Manager, and improving contacts with those on the waiting list, the number dropped from 96 to 10 in March and to one in May.   

The latest figures from September showed that the figure had risen to 11 and that there had been a sharp rise in waiting times at 39 weeks, going from 25 young people on the list in June to 64 in September. 

Lewisham CAMHS has had a 23 per cent increase in funding from the CCG since 2015/16 to £3,245,000 this year, while it received £5.9 million overall.

But Cllr Barnham said Lewisham is owed more after comparing to other boroughs. 

He said: “One interesting thing that has emerged from the benchmarking is that it appears that Lewisham’s CCG funding, the NHS funding into this service, is a lower proportion of the overall mental health funding than in other boroughs. 

“To put that into context, if you look at somewhere like Camden they have two thirds of the number of young people that we do, but we have two thirds of their CCG funding for CAMHS. 

“That looks odd to me, I don’t know why that is and we are raising those questions. 

“The national average proportion of mental health funding that goes on young people is 6.8 per cent, which feels really low to me. 

“In Lewisham our proportion is lower than that. I don’t understand why our proportion should be lower than the national average given the population, the age profile and the needs that we identify. 

“So we are asking questions because, putting it really crudely, we’re due a bit more funding from the NHS for our mental health support for young people.” 

Chair of NHS Lewisham CCG, Dr Faruk Majid, said: “Child and adolescent mental health is of paramount importance, and has understandably risen up the national agenda in recent years.

“That’s why we are motivated to drive continual improvements.

“Reviews of children and young people’s mental health provision took place in 2018/19 and these have led to the development of a sustainable improvement plan.

“Benchmarking exercises have taken place in order to inform a review of funding levels and we’re encouraged that Lewisham CCG’s investment in child and young person’s mental health has increased by 23 per cent since 2015/16.

“We’re closely monitoring existing resources and are confident that we will sustain improvements to waiting lists for young people of Lewisham.

“We also secured an additional £700,000 in mental health trailblazer teams in schools.

“And we’re embarking on new work, supporting schools and their pupils next year, which will include two teams working with 19 primary and secondary schools in Lewisham in 2020-2021.”

A Lewisham Council spokesperson said: “We work extremely closely with our NHS partners to make sure that specialist mental health services meet the needs of our young people.

“We welcome the additional resources that have been provided in recent years. But benchmarking against other areas suggests that further NHS investment needs to be explored.”