Just before the general election, a colleague and I met shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth’s team to make the case for scrapping the government’s flagship talking therapy service, Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT).
It would have been a long, hard sell, even to a left Labour government. Politicians, NHS bosses and the media have been singing the praises of short term cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) for years. And, for Labour, after all, IAPT is one of its own, launched in 2008 by Tony Blair’s ‘happiness tsar’ Lord
Richard Layard, and
trumpeted around the world as a sort of miracle cure for common mental health conditions.
Under the Tories, scrapping IAPT will be a lot harder.
IAPT is designed to provide psychological therapies at primary care level for the
NHS throughout England. It was rolled out during the financial crash, and amid all the austerity cuts and empty promises for mental health services, its funding has quadrupled to nearly
£400m a year over the last decade. It rapidly replaced most other counselling and psychotherapy provided by GP practices and the third sector – closing hundreds of locally based services and forcing others to convert to its short-term, number-crunching regime. IAPT, inevitably, is increasingly an
outsourced provision populated by private companies.