26/11/2025
The Autumn Budget landed today.
Plenty of talk from Rachel Reeves about numbers. Not much about the people behind them.
I listened out for something on mental health. Anything. A line. A sentence. Even a nod.
Nothing.
It feels strange to hear a budget outline the future of the country and for the wellbeing of actual humans to be treated like background noise. Especially when every single service that works with children, young people, families, carers, foster carers, SEND, schools, social care, youth work, CAMHS, and alternative provisions is already stretched so thin it could snap.
We keep being told that early intervention matters. That prevention is cheaper than crisis. That mental health deserves parity with physical health.
Yet when the Treasury had a national platform to back that up, it didn’t.
And the thing that gets me is this: these gaps don’t disappear because they weren’t mentioned. They just land on the backs of the same tired workforce.
The teachers. The social workers. The youth workers. The foster carers.
The people who’ve already been running on fumes for years.
It’s why small providers, community projects, and grassroots interventions like equine-assisted work end up trying to hold the pieces together. Not because we’re “nice extras”, but because children and young people are facing real emotional pain right now, not in a theoretical budget forecast.
If mental health wasn’t worth naming today, it becomes even more important for us to keep naming it.
Louder. Braver. In every space we have.
Because silence from the top never means the need has gone.
It just means we carry on doing the work that should never have been left to us alone.
