- 4:31 pm
- I beg to move,That this House has considered the matter of the prevention of deaths from eating disorders.It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Desmond. I thank all hon. Members for attending this debate on a topic extremely close to my heart. As hon. Members may know by now, I am the very proud Member for Isle of Wight West and do my utmost to champion the island in this place, but I have brought forward this debate not only as an MP, but as a father who for some years was genuinely fearful as to whether I would see my child reach their 18th birthday.From the moment someone becomes a parent, their instinct is to protect and nurture their children—often, admittedly, much easier said than done—yet nothing can truly prepare anyone for the overwhelming sense of powerlessness that comes when their child develops an eating disorder. Eating disorders, in all their destructive forms, are one of the few types of illness where the person affected does not want to recover and they actively work against you. Watching your child struggle not only with the illness but with the very treatments meant to help them is truly something I would not wish on any parent, yet it is the reality faced by thousands of parents, families and friends up and down the country.We all know by now that the pandemic has taken a wrecking ball to children and young people’s mental health, but we cannot pretend that these issues do not predate 2020. Since the mid-1990s, eating disorders have been found to carry the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric illness. However, in the UK, we are unable even to quantify the true havoc that eating disorders cause, because of the lack of a national register for eating disorder deaths. The most recent year with confirmed data from the Office for National Statistics is 2019, when 36 deaths were recorded. However, a US study suggests that the real figure in the UK could be closer to 1,860 deaths, which I am sure people in this room would more than agree with.
- A constituent got in touch with me because sadly his daughter did not see her 30th birthday owing to an eating disorder. The point that my constituent made was that that was in part because of a lack of adequate services for those affected by these life-threatening conditions. Does the hon. Member agree?
- I agree entirely. We are fully aware of the political situation and the condition that the NHS was left in under the previous Government, but the point of today’s debate is not to make cheap political attacks; it is to focus on the matter in hand, which is eating disorders, so I thank the hon. Member for his intervention.With widespread under-reporting, misclassification and inconsistencies across the country, many of these deaths are wrongly recorded as organ failure, masking the true role of eating disorders and preventing us from fully grasping the scale of the crisis, especially among otherwise healthy young people.
- Does my hon. Friend agree that, further to masking the scale of the crisis, excluding eating disorders as a contributing factor on death certificates also cruelly extends the pain that families feel, insinuating that otherwise healthy young people have died from organ failure?
- I thank my hon. Friend for that important point—it does. The loss of a loved one is harrowing enough without the true cause not being recorded. That is why we are calling for a confidential inquiry into eating disorder deaths.Given the concerns about under-reporting and inconsistencies in the data, it is even more alarming to read the findings from the Health Service Journal that revealed that between 2018 and 2023, 19 deaths related to eating disorders could have been entirely avoided. These tragic outcomes are attributed to severe failures in care, including missed or poorly managed safety risks, a lack of specialist knowledge among healthcare professionals and unacceptable delays in accessing appropriate treatment. If I were to ask for a show of hands in this room, I am sure many would be raised on that point.
- As the MP for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket, I take a great interest in the progress of the Norfolk and Suffolk NHS foundation trust under the leadership of Caroline Donovan and Zoë Billingham, who I met recently in Parliament. Does my hon. Friend agree that early intervention is no more expensive and in many cases cheaper than delayed intervention, but is much more effective and saves lives?
- I thank my hon. Friend for his extremely pertinent point. Early intervention saves not only lives but a huge amount in costs to the NHS.I know the vast majority of NHS staff go above and beyond to support patients, often under immense pressure, and many of us here would like to put on record our thanks to them. However, these failures point to a systemic issue.
- One of the issues in geographically remote areas like Carlisle and Cumbria is that, sadly, the in-patient treatment for young people with eating disorders is delivered by an out-of-area NHS trust. Tragically, the inquest into the death of a young woman from my constituency earlier this year found that there had been a failure in collaboration between the two trusts, resulting, sadly, in her death. Does my hon. Friend agree that it is not just a question of resource, and that we also need a culture of collaboration and patient-centred care across all our trusts if we are going to prevent deaths?
- It is true that a lack of understanding among professionals about the severity of the problem contributes to the situation. To have it put down to a lack of collaboration would be infuriating for that parent, as well as truly tragic.We know well by now that early intervention is crucial for identifying and supporting recovery in patients with eating disorders. However, as a parent of someone affected, I must say that has not been my experience on the ground. Hospital admissions for eating disorders have surged, exceeding 30,000 for the first time in 2023-24, which is a 60% increase compared with pre-pandemic levels. While the NHS struggles to meet this growing demand, private equity firms are profiting from the crisis by owning many of the in-patient units the NHS depends on.
- Does my hon. Friend agree that his point highlights the urgent need for the Department to examine the influence of private equity in NHS in-patient mental health services? It is vital that private sector involvement complements the NHS’s mission to deliver high-quality patient-centred care and does not serve as a vehicle for profit-making at the expense of vulnerable patients.
- My hon. Friend is entirely correct. Our experience of private equity is that it is selective in terms of the patients accepted. It profits from misery. We were put in the awful position of having to choose to send our youngest child to a hospital that had just seen the tragic death of Ruth Szymankiewicz—I take this opportunity to pay tribute to Ruth’s parents. Our second trip to a private equity-run hospital led to them forgetting to feed my daughter 11 times. My hon. Friend’s point is, unfortunately, well made.More concerning still is that I do not believe that our approach to treatment is changing year on year to confront the heightened demand. If these admission increases were associated with a disease such as cancer, the treatment would quite rightly adapt. Our approach to mental health treatment, especially eating disorders, remains stagnant, outdated and alarmingly resistant to progress.Another deeply concerning issue is how we respond when patients with severe anorexia refuse treatment and are subsequently diagnosed as terminally anorexic, a classification that holds precedent in UK Court of Protection rulings. In such cases, treatment may be withdrawn entirely, resulting in preventable deaths, such as that of a young patient known as BG who tragically died aged 19 in 2022. For those who may argue that treatment will be withdrawn only when a patient is terminally ill, I point to the case of Patricia, previously deemed untreatable by the Court of Protection, only to have the judgment overturned last month—August 2025. That reversal highlights not only the fallibility of such decisions but the danger in labelling eating disorder patients as beyond help.We cannot ignore the fact that eating disorder deaths are most likely to occur due to suicide. Following an evidence session of the eating disorders all-party parliamentary group, one expert stated that their research found that anorexia sufferers are 18 times more likely and bulimia sufferers seven times more likely to die from suicide than the average patient, due to a combination of pre-existing and untreated mental health conditions, early discharge and the physical effects of eating disorder recovery triggering suicidal ideation. I do not wish to pre-empt the response from the Minister, who I know is keen to make improvements in this area, but I believe that eating disorders must be included in the suicide prevention strategy if we are to meaningfully tackle this worrying trend and stop patients from falling between the gaps in the already patchy world of child and adolescent mental health service provision.
- I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing such an important debate. I recently met a constituent who has been living with an eating disorder for years and who raised a number of important issues. She is fortunate to have a loving, supportive family but they often feel the system is impossible to navigate. Would my hon. Friend join me in encouraging the Minister to look at how the Government can support the families and loved ones of those living with an eating disorder, and to consider how care could be better structured to effectively treat the combined mental and physical effects of eating disorders in healthcare settings?
- I thank my hon. Friend for her excellent intervention. I agree that this is a family-wide illness. We must reach the point where no one in the UK dies from an eating disorder, where every individual—man, woman, girl, boy—regardless of age, location or clinical classification has access to the support they need when they need it.I want to finish with the story of a young woman called Zara. She was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa in May 2013 and was admitted to an eating disorder unit almost immediately. Instead of being good news for her recovery, that was when the nightmare began. From May 2013 to June 2021, Zara endured 13 in-patient admissions across seven different units, including three years as a continuous in-patient, nearly two of which she spent without leaving one of the units or going outside. With each admission, her eating disorder and mental health deteriorated further.During that time Zara was restrained daily, often by a minimum of six people holding her down. She received very little therapy; instead there was a culture of patient blaming and shaming. In the last two years of her life, Zara was crying out for help but no one would listen. The eating disorder unit eventually discharged her completely, handing her over to the community mental health team. Her mum, who is with us today, spent nearly every day taking ligatures off her neck, lifting her down from a wardrobe when she was nearly unconscious, and performing CPR when she was found unresponsive in the shower.Zara’s mum states there was little to no support from the community psychiatrist; her family were left to cope alone. No matter how much they pleaded for help, it was a constant battle and they never received the support Zara so desperately needed. Zara should never have died of this illness. There was a whole world out there for her and she had so much to give, but ultimately she felt everyone had given up on her. She was only 24 when she died, but she was exhausted and did not know any other way to keep going without support.
- Several hon. Members rose—
- Order. There will be a formal time limit of one and a half minutes, and I will not be able to call everyone.
- 4:45 pm
- I will be quick, in that case. I express my appreciation to the hon. Member for Isle of Wight West (Mr Quigley) for a very important speech; I am grateful to him. I particularly welcome the points made by him and the hon. Member for Carlisle (Ms Minns) about the need for better understanding and collaboration in the system, and I echo his call for the national register of deaths to reflect deaths from eating disorders.I pay tribute to the Cotswold House unit, run by the Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust in Marlborough in my constituency, which is a really important in-patient and out-patient unit working with adults. I echo the points, which I think are shared across the Chamber, about the value of NHS units as opposed to operations run by private equity companies, whose work I have real concerns about.I want to add a couple of points to those made by hon. Members about the very legitimate campaigns of the organisations to which we are all indebted for their work. First, the point about early intervention has been made and I will not repeat it, but we clearly need to invest in more understanding both at GP level and among communities and families, and support people while they are still at home. Secondly, we must ensure we have a better and more adequate transition from children’s to adult services, which is a real issue I have come across in casework.My final point is about the importance of step-down provision. It is not enough just to get people back to a healthy weight and then leave them to themselves; they need proper support for many months—