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Our campaign on child and adolescent mental health, Changing Minds: Better Mental Health Care for Children, has focused on the urgent need to improve the number and quality of services. The complete omission of any specific mention of these services, both from the draft Mental Health Bill covering England and Wales and the proposed Scottish legislation, raises the question whether either government can seriously claim to share the aims of our campaign.

There are certainly reasons for thinking that the Westminster government would be sympathetic to these aims. A key objective of its new national suicide prevention strategy for England is the promotion of mental health among children and young people as part of an attempt to reduce overall suicide rates by at least 20 per cent by 2005. This makes excellent sense, but there is no point in setting objectives, however laudable, in the absence of an appropriate legislative and service framework. The government wants to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds - a policy that must come to grief.


For a start, the tenor of the proposed mental health legislation is public protection. The main planks are compulsory treatment in the community and the detention of people with personality disorders, with little or no recognition of the special therapeutic needs of individual client groups. In the case of children and young people, the draft Mental Health Bill neglects even to notice their differing social and developmental needs.

Worse still, independent research carried out for Mind reveals that more than half of 15 to 24 year olds would shy away from medical help for depression if compulsory treatment were introduced.

No wonder, then, that the Mental Health Alliance has condemned the draft bill as "fundamentally flawed, unworkable and unethical". But the most remarkable example of the incoherence of government policy, despite all the protestations about joined-up thinking, is the decision to give courts more powers to remand 12 to 16 year olds in custody. The move will inevitably lead to an increase in prison remands, at least for children at the upper end of this age group - even though they are notoriously vulnerable to suicide attempts while in jail. Figures released by the Children's Society show that 8.5 per cent of children interviewed while on prison remand had mental health problems, with almost as many attempting suicide or self-harm. The case of 16-year-old Kevin Jacobs, found hanged in his cell at Feltham young offenders institution, is only the latest in a long line.


Section 130 of the Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001, which confers the new powers on courts, has been widely criticised. Once again it embodies the government's obsession with public protection, regardless of the cost to individuals and no matter how marginal the impact on crime levels. It is not going too far to say that children's lives will be put at risk, merely on the off-chance that some joy-riders, small-time burglars and vandals will reoffend unless detained. Many of course, will eventually be found innocent.

For more than 10 years governments have promised us a more enlightened approach to children and young people in the criminal justice system. Time and again these promises have been broken. The UN, when it judges the UK's performance against the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child this week, will hear that there are more young people imprisoned here than in any other country in Europe except Germany. If this government is serious about achieving the aims set out in the suicide prevention strategy, every minister whose brief impinges on the welfare of children must come to recognise that they need care as well as control.