The reports in today’s Blackpool Gazette about mental healthcare provision on the Fylde depress me profoundly. I’ve spent years arguing for improved mental healthcare in this country – it really is one of the most neglected parts of our neglected NHS. It’s a disgrace, especially when you think that one in five of us is likely to experience some form of mental ill-health at some point in our lives. It is not something which should be stigmatised or sidelined as somehow ‘unfashionable’. The consequences are often to be found in our prisons where so many prisoners have either an addiction, a mental health problem or both. Care in the community these days has too much community and far too little care.

In Blackpool , though, it leaves me horrified to hear that there are still mixed-sex wards for the mentally ill at local hospitals – TEN YEARS after Labour said they would be gotten rid of. Over and over again they claim to have solved the problem – but all that happens is that they install a curtain down the middle of a ward and claim its segregated, even though facilities remain shared. Do they not understand the indignity and the fear that mixed-sex wards invoke in already vulnerable and fearful patients?

Whilst we wait for a long-promised new mental health facility, conditions just get worse in the existing wards. Nothing will get done because hospital bosses will see no need to spend money on facilities which may be defunct. But they haven’t even chosen a site for the new facility yet, let alone built it – and how many times do we hear of plans for new hospitals falling by the wayside? Furthermore, the new place is likely to have fewer beds. As Margaret Wilson from the local branch of MIND has said, she hopes “a reduction in beds will not mean a reduction in services”.

Labour has become a by-word for incompetence in recent years. But their scandalous failings in mental health care and with mixed-sex wards are not a matter of incompetence, but of wilful neglect. They should be ashamed.