This MP column comes from Bradford West MP Naz Shah 

Successive Conservative Prime Ministers have talked about parity of esteem for mental health and of levelling up the country.

There is little evidence of that in their flagship New Hospitals Programme, which has wilfully overlooked both areas.

Lynfield Mount Hospital in Bradford is facing extreme challenges due to an outdated 1950s building that has left Bradford District Care NHS Foundation Trust with a £68m backlog maintenance bill - the fifth highest in the whole country per square metre.

Despite its caring staff, the Trust has had to increase its spending by 61 per cent over the last 12 months just to manage the upkeep of the building and those figures are only going to increase.

The challenge for Lynfield Mount Hospital in its bid to secure funding appears to be that it operates in two areas that aren’t a priority for the Government - mental health and Yorkshire.

I was shocked to learn that, of the first 40 hospitals so far selected to receive investment from the New Hospitals Programme, only two were for mental health and only one was in Yorkshire - compared to six in London alone.

I am a passionate advocate for mental health and have put on public record my own battle.

I am also a proud Yorkshire woman, born in and representing Bradford, which is the fifth most income-deprived area of the country.

This is an important fact, since evidence suggests that those living in poverty are more likely to experience serious mental illness.

Ever since the Health and Social Care Act was published in 2012, the Secretary of State has had a legal duty to focus equally on physical and mental health.

However, despite talk of ‘parity of esteem’, several reports show that mental health hospitals are not being treated equally by the Government.

In 2019, the Government announced that it would be building more than 40 new hospitals in “the biggest hospital building programme for a generation”.

Surely then, this flagship programme could provide the opportunity to start addressing the structural discrimination that has caused mental health hospitals to be so underfunded for so very long?

Unfortunately, it has not.

A new analysis of the first 40 schemes selected by the New Hospitals Programme has shown that just two were for mental health hospitals and, so far, only two per cent of the £3.7bn that has been committed to the programme in this Spending Review period, is going to mental health hospitals.

The analysis also showed that, despite the Government describing levelling up as its “defining mission” the North has missed out again with the New Hospitals Programme, with just eight schemes selected, compared to 21 in the South.

Yorkshire is the worst-funded in the country too, with just one scheme for the entire region.

How can that be fair, when London gets six?

Lynfield Mount Hospital in my constituency was designed in the 1950s, when attitudes to mental health were, sadly, very different.

Bathrooms are shared by 20 plus patients and the building’s design and large wards make it hard for patients to find a quiet place.

There are also major structural problems linked to the building’s design, with a significant number of callouts for building repairs.

The care is rated ‘good’ and it’s clear from patients’ feedback that it’s the caring staff – not the building – that supports their recovery.

This is a perfect example of why the Government cannot continue to turn a blind eye to the needs of mental health hospitals.

If it does, talks about ‘parity of esteem’ for mental health and levelling up the country are really just empty promises.

When the Government published its selection criteria for the final eight hospitals of the New Hospitals Programme, it committed to ensure a “fairer allocation of investment,” with mental health trusts described as a key priority and it promised to level up across the regions too.

The latest news from the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care on the New Hospitals Programme is that costs for the first 40 schemes are escalating beyond the levels that had been expected.

If this is the case, then I would urge those making decisions around the final eight to look again at the relative costs of mental health hospitals like Lynfield Mount Hospital in Bradford that requires just £90m - much less than many other bids.

The investment would lead to a world class facility in an area that has been overlooked for too long, and wider benefits for the local economy.

The Government has continually described the New Hospitals Programme as the biggest hospital building programme of a generation. It must ensure with the final eight schemes that it does truly ‘level up’.