The hon. Gentleman’s intervention was timely, for I was just about to say that we should examine the important, complex and sensitive issue of whether minorities are disproportionately suffering poor mental health treatment or outcomes. We should be careful, however, about reaching for the knee-jerk—and potentially mistaken—conclusion and labelling the problem as one of institutional racism.
In that regard, I hope that Sir Simon Wessely takes note of the arguments made forcefully by Munira Mirza, the former Deputy Mayor of London, who has cited Professor Swaran Singh, a social and community psychiatrist with, I think, 30 years of clinical experience in this area, who has argued that institutional racism in his profession is not the primary cause of BME communities’ being disproportionately affected by these issues. He cites academic studies showing that BME communities and migrant groups are more exposed to mental health risk factors. We should tackle those underlying risk factors as a matter of priority. They include things such as family breakdown, substance abuse, poverty, living in areas with low social cohesion and, of course, the personal experience of migration and prior instances of racial prejudice. It is a sensitive area. The headline numbers obviously pose difficult questions for our public services, but we should get to grips with the underlying data before reaching for conclusions that may well be incorrect and that may not pay tribute to the work that people are doing with the best of intentions.
We must be more ambitious and use every opportunity available to further our efforts. Programmes such as mental awareness courses in the National Citizen Service or the £150 million that the Government are investing to support teenagers with eating disorders are practical, and will ensure that discussing mental health is not something that we do only in isolation or that happens only in a clinical setting.