Minister Alison McGovern speech at the Youth Access Conference

10 Nov 2026 01:32 PM

Minister McGovern yesterday delivered the keynote speech at the Youth Access Conference in Camden.

It’s lovely to be here in Camden. So thank you to Zappi for for letting us all use their space.

It is genuinely lovely for me to be in Camden this afternoon, because I know that you are all from North, South, East and West, all over the country.

But this part of London- though I am very much a Northerner - this part of London is special to me. Now University College London, their halls, student halls are literally just up the road there on Camden Road, a couple people nodding.

And I moved into them when I was 18, when I had just left school and I came to London to study philosophy. And I remember that experience of moving to Camden when I read Professor Peter Fonagy’s foreword to his recent reports on the prevalence of mental health, autism and ADHD.

I hope that you’ve all read that bit as well in amongst the other six hundred pages. Professor Fonagy describes his own mental ill health as a young person, and that University College London made exceptions for him as a student affected by a dysgraphia and how given that, it was no surprise that he has worked at UCL here in London ever since.

And that was Professor Fonay’s personal experience. We often talk about the importance of lived experience and policy making.

So today I want to share my own experience. And I do so in the hope that young people have heard in recent months that politicians do not think that they are snowflakes. Or have failed in any way, but rather that we can understand what it is that they have been through.

Because with the evidence showing that the proportion of young people having a mental health condition has increased from one in six, when I was growing up, to one in four today.

The simple truth is that there are more young people who know what it’s like to have to build yourself back up, when something has gone wrong.

And I hope that the publication of the Fonagy reviews that people now understand that this generation is not weaker than before, what has changed is the circumstances that they face.

Just when growing up got harder in the social media age, the support that they needed was stripped Away.

Young people have dealt with the ABC of economic doom . Austerity, Brexit, and then Covid. An increasing loneliness, fewer opportunities to belong and cutbacks to spaces, for rest, physical activity, and social connection.

Now, when I arrived here in Camden for UCL it was after teenage years that had had some difficulties. My dad’s first bout of cancer in 1992 came at a tough time, life had not been easy and discovering that the person responsible for the family finances might die was quite stressful. It was all the worse due to my family history, my mum had lost her own father to lung cancer at 14, when her dad was 40, and my dad was 40 when he was diagnosed, and my older sister was 14.

And it felt like and my parents sometimes said that it was like history repeating itself. That and other issues have shaped my mental health. My anxieties are many. Some might say, if you’re not anxious in politics…

But I worry that someone I love is about to die or be hurt. And this manifests itself sometimes in strange visuals, moments where I see car crashing and people choking or things falling from height as I go around my daily life and I sometimes get flashbacks, sometimes strange feelings of imminent catastrophe. My brain screams at me and sometimes this has been panic attacks.

Now I suspect, as I joke, that I have ended up in a world where stress is normal like politics because in part having reasons for near panic feels easier, it means my brain has something rational to worry about.

Speaking from the despatch box in the House of Commons taking questions, being on live radio these things are stressful.

But to me, they feel easier because then my anxiety has a locus. It has a reason. As a young person though, I had none of the language or insight into how my thought processes could drive the way I was feeling. But nonetheless, my tutors in the UCL philosophy department were incredibly kind when, as an anxious teenager arrived at the capital.

Now not everyone needs to read Immanuel Kant or David Hume, but I learnt from those tutors, that which you in this room all know, that every young person needs people who can listen. That is going to be one of the principles at the heart of the mental health strategy, which I’ll talk about shortly.

But before I do. Let me review progress so far. As we promised in opposition, since 2024 we’ve recruited thousands of additional mental health workers, people are more likely to be able to have therapy. And in school, it’s much more common to have a mental health support team and we’re going to make sure they’re everywhere by 2029.

We’ll spend 16.3 billion pounds on Mental Health Services this year, which is a record amount and an increase of £180 million on last year.

Now because A&E isn’t the right place if you’re in a mental health crisis, we have a plan for 59 mental health emergency departments and to help people who have been in crisis stay well we’re spending 343 million pounds on 100 Community Based Mental Health Centres.

And this part you will know we’ve provided over 20 million pounds in DHSC top-up funding for 24 early support hubs since 2024 which includes the 7 million pounds this year, which will support at least 30,000 additional interventions.

Now, I want to say a little bit more about these early support hubs because I know that many of you in this room are making them work in community right across our country.

The principal behind it is an important one hat young people should not ever have to reach crisis for them to secure a formal diagnosis or navigate complicated referral processes before they can get help.

Open access mental health support means being able to walk through the door talk to someone who you trust and get help with what’s happening in life.

And hubs up and down the country which many of you lead and work within are helping to prove that concept. They’re showing the value of welcoming non-judgmental spaces where young people can get support early, where their mental health is understood alongside the other pressures in their lives and where they can be connected to more specialist help when and if they need it.

So on that want to say something about the mental health strategy which as Dan said we will soon publish. The strategy will bring to light the terrible lack of progress in treating, medically and otherwise, serious conditions, like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, it will respond to the position young people find themselves in, especially young people, especially young women with illnesses we don’t talk enough about like eating disorders and the worrying rise in self-harm.

We will bring to the fall, the terrible waiting times that some children and young people face for mental health treatment.

Now, even while some parts of the country have ended already the delay to helping our children, there are still way too many of the next generation, whose only support offer that they have received has been a place in a years long queue.

But this strategy cannot be for the NHS alone, it must give equal weight to the assets we need in our communities to give young people their social life back.

We all know that preventing mental ill health is as important as treating it, and that participation in work, college, culture, sport, art and society is just as important a prescription as any script a doctor can write.

The experience of Youth Access members is that fully rounded support that sees the whole person, not just one aspect of their life is much more likely to be successful.

We want to learn those lessons and work within the brain what’s already happening in communities up and down the UK.

I want to make it much more likely that young people who need it, will have someone to listen. I want to make it much more likely that the listening will lead to understanding and that the support works just as well if you are autistic, have ADHD, are LGBT+, or black, or from another community that is overlooked or locked out.

I want the strategy to be honest about the situation young women are facing today when they bear the brunt of mental distress. And I want to make it much more likely that the understanding will bring out who that young person wants to be and will encourage them to take the next step that can lead them towards the future they want for themselves.

Now, that sounds like a simple thing. But to return again to Professor Fonagy’s review, he describes the situation young people face today, a cacophony of voices, most of them digital, many of them confident, few of them accountable. And that has made the ordinary developmental process of understanding oneself far harder than it was for previous generations.

That’s not fair to the next generation, we owe them so much better. Helping young people through their journey in a better way is what the organisations in this room do every day, every week, and I admire that work greatly.

I hope that you will not have to wait too much longer before the country’s first new mental health strategy in 15 years. What were we doing for 15 years?

And that you’ll see in it some of the insights that you have on the interconnected nature of challenges and opportunities in young people’s lives.

Most of all its purpose is to turn the page on a decade and a half in which young people have bore the cost of society’s failures to prioritise their choices and their chances in life. The idea behind it is to give us all a little bit more happiness and more hope.

So, thank you for welcoming me here today, and for all the work that you do for our young people.