Debate contribution: Community Crisis Intervention Service: Closure

Debate contribution by Mr Mike Nesbitt on 14 October 2025.

MLA

Mr Mike Nesbitt

Party at the time

Ulster Unionist Party

Date

14 October 2025

Type

Debate contribution (made as a minister)

Business

Opposition Business

Heading

Community Crisis Intervention Service: Closure

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 5181251

Read the official Assembly record

Text

Thank you, Madam Principal Deputy Speaker, and thanks to everybody who spoke in the debate. Let me be very clear that I very much regret what has happened to the community crisis intervention service. As has been pointed out, it has helped over 3,400 people through one-to-one interventions since 2021. Before turning to the detail of the situation, it might be helpful to speak to the wider context of mental health, given that so many Members have turned to it. Northern Ireland has the highest prevalence of mental health problems in the United Kingdom, with a 25% higher overall prevalence of mental health problems compared with England. The proportion of the Budget in Northern Ireland devoted to mental health is around 6%, which is half that in England. Underlying that are high levels of the social determinants of mental ill health, such as poverty, poor housing, domestic violence and economic inactivity. In 2008, 39% of the population in Northern Ireland reported experiencing a traumatic event related to our 30 years of conflict. Members will know that I am determined to do something about mental health, as I have campaigned on the issue since I was elected to the House in 2011, so everything points to the fact that we are facing a financial crisis in the Department of Health. Funding for the CCIS, as one Member pointed out, was initially provided by Derry City and Strabane District Council as a pilot from 2018 to 2021. The Health and Social Care Board provided £27,000 of support in 2020. Subsequently, my Department provided some funding to allow the project to continue. From autumn 2021 until March of this year, Extern received £504,989 from the mental health support fund via the Community Foundation. That money came out of a one-off, three-year scheme to support mental health organisations that was funded using unspent COVID-19 funds. Given the well-documented position of my Department's budget, with all the resources having been allocated, the scheme has now ended. My Department identified a further £42,300 of non-recurrent funding to allow for an extension until June of this year, but, unfortunately, given our ongoing extreme budget challenges, no further funds could be found. Via Extern, the CCIS applied to the core grant scheme for the 2025-26 funding round but was not successful. I will address that, because two Members said that the Department withdrew funding, as if it were a deliberate act. It is inaccurate and unfair to suggest that it was a deliberate act. I looked at the core grant scheme when I was appointed Minister, and it was frozen. I wanted to bring the scheme back into operation, but I also wanted to review it, because its application process had not changed in over 20 years, meaning that no charity set up in the past 20 years could apply to the old scheme. We worked with the Northern Ireland Council for Voluntary Action (NICVA), which facilitated workshops at which the community and voluntary sector told us how the core grant scheme should be redesigned. It is an unfortunate fact that, when it applied, Northlands was unsuccessful. We did not withdraw funds from Northlands or the CCIS. Rather, their applications were simply unsuccessful.

The Member either misinterprets me or misheard me. I said that we did not withdraw funding from Northlands or the CCIS, and that is the case. I will move on to what is available. The Western Trust's home treatment team offers crisis support alongside GP out-of-hours provision and people can access emergency departments. There is still a range of partners in the community and voluntary sector, and, of course, Lifeline provides round-the-clock community assistance. Over the summer, we saw the publication of the new Protect Life 2 action and implementation plans, which will substantially enhance our efforts to reduce suicide and self-harm. Budgets remain a significant challenge. I have reallocated around £300,000 of funding to year 1 of the action plan. That funding is to promote awareness raising and prevention and to support local work on delivering the Protect Life 2 strategy actions right across Northern Ireland. In addition, EY has reviewed the scale and scope of the community and voluntary sector across Northern Ireland in order to enable a greater analysis to be done of its provision and of how it can work in partnership to achieve positive outcomes.

A regional mental health liaison and crisis response home treatment care network has also been set up. It has a focus on pathways, operating procedures, thresholds, documentation, information, training and equity.

Service improvements will be progressed in order to ensure timely mental health assessment of those who are presenting in need to emergency departments and to ensure that we have a regionally equitable crisis response and home treatment service that provides acute mental health care in the community as an alternative to psychiatric hospital admission.

Yes.

I take the Member's point, but you have to separate what is happening in the community from what is happening in the hospitals. My overall aim, together with the permanent secretary, is to move health and social care as close as possible to people's front doors, if not delivering it at home. This is about trying to get services as close as possible to people's front doors and to keep them out of hospital. That is not something that we are going to be able to do in a day, a week or a year. A cross-departmental coordination action group was established by the mental health champion some time ago, in October 2023, in order to consider crisis services and suicide prevention in Derry/Londonderry and to develop actions to address suicide prevention, along with other relevant issues at the river and the bridges in the city. I campaigned for a mental health champion many years ago. Previously, I tabled a debate in the Chamber and was unsuccessful, but, when Robin Swann took over the Ministry, we were able to appoint Professor Siobhan O'Neill. The appointment of an independent mental health champion was no small thing. She is now able to stand up, as she did last week, and criticise the lack of the delivery of the mental health strategy. That happened only because I and then Robin Swann pressed for the appointment of a mental health champion, who turned out to be Professor Siobhan O'Neill. Lastly, I have to return to the Department's overall financial position. We are facing the most significant shortfall that the Department has ever faced: around £600 million. That is unprecedented and, frankly, unmanageable. I warn again that we need £200 million of that £600 million in order to action pay parity, which was, first, a commitment in New Decade, New Approach but was subsequently endorsed by the Northern Ireland Executive. If we cannot do that, we are going into the potentially uncharted waters of industrial and strike action. I apologise to Members that I am not doing as much as I would like to do in mental health, but it is not for lack of trying. It is because of a lack of resource and funding. There is no quick or easy fix. I had a meeting today to look at next year's financial position, which is bleak. There is no other way to put it. We are in for rough waters over the rest of the mandate.

1,224 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

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