YOUR correspondent Tony Sedgwick was quite right to deplore government spin when trying to excuse the results of austerity policies – in his case cuts to prison staff numbers (Gazette, August 10).
However, there is another kind of government spin that comes in the form of promises. In her column, Claire Perry MP welcomes her government’s promise of 21,000 new NHS mental health workers in England. ‘New’?
She apparently needs to be reminded that the latest figures show there are 6,000 fewer mental health nurses and 170 fewer psychiatrists in England than there were in 2010.
Replacing them makes a big hole in that 21,000. One seasoned NHS observer has described the aim of training or recruiting those 21,000 specialist mental health staff in four years as ‘fantasy’.
When judging such announcements we should not forget the Coalition’s promise in 2010 to recruit 4,200 more health visitors for England by March 2015 – trumpeted at the time by Mrs Perry.
This target was never reached despite the work of the Department’s ‘Health Visitor Taskforce’ and the costly attempt to recruit 200 health visitors from Denmark.
And those were the days when EU staff were still keen to work in England – were still welcomed here and were not liable to be shouted at in the street and told to go home.
TONY MILLETT
Marlborough