2. How does the Welsh Government intend to respond to the recent review of deaths of children and young people by suicide or suspected suicide? OAQ54862

I thank Lynne Neagle for that question, Llywydd. Part of the Welsh Government’s response to the review was set out in our draft budget, published on 16 December, with additional investment in suicide prevention services, a doubling of our investment in the whole-school approach to mental health, and an extension of the pilot child and adolescent mental health service's In-Reach to Schools programme.

First Minister, the loss of every one of the 33 young people included in that review is an immense tragedy, which will have devastated families, schools, friends, and whole communities. I believe that review is the closest thing we have to hearing the voices of young people who have died by suicide; the nearest thing we have to retrospective recommendations from those young people about what could have helped them, and how we could prevent future deaths. First Minister, will you make a commitment that you will look at this review very carefully, and, on behalf of your whole Government, ensure that all the recommendations in it are driven forward with urgency and vigour?

I thank the Member for that. I've had an opportunity already to read the review, to read her own foreword to it, and the foreword by the Children's Commissioner for Wales, and to look at its recommendations. And of course Lynne Neagle is right, Llywydd, that a death by suicide leaves a ripple of effects that reaches out into the lives of people who are left, not simply in the immediate family, but in friends and other organisations who will have known that child or that young person.

Amongst the recommendations of the report, I think a really important one is that the 33 young people whose cases are reviewed in the report, a third of them were known to mental health services. And yet, many more of them were known to other public services, who may not have had suicide and suicide prevention at the front of their minds when they were working with that young person—whether that's in youth custody, where we know that there has been a really alarming rise in suicide in custodial settings; whether that's contact with the police; whether it's young people who are known to social services in different ways. So, of course the Government will be committed to absorbing the recommendations of the report, right across the Government. Because it is not a matter for the health Minister, although Public Health Wales was part of the production of the report; it is a report for the whole of the Government, looking to see that, wherever vulnerable young people are in touch with public services—devolved and non-devolved—the signs that may be there, the causes that may be identifiable, are recognised and acted upon, in line with the recommendations of the report.

Well, of course, this report is part of a bigger picture of reviews that have been taking place over many years. For those families and friends of the young people who killed themselves in Bridgend in 2007 and 2008 and beyond, obviously, for them, those events don't feel so very long ago. And of course, the use of the internet implicated in that suicide cluster, which is now so embedded in the lives of our young children and young—well, young people generally—for me, it feels almost impossible to try and protect against those evils, when we have so little control over its positive use.

In 2015, the University of Oxford Centre for Suicide Research recommended measures for those local services, to deal with suicide contagion—not a very nice phrase, but I think you know what I mean. It was an England document, but I'm sure Public Health Wales will have seen it as well. Can we attribute the drop in the occurrence of these suicide clusters to local services acting on research of that nature? Because if we can, that gives us greater confidence in local services taking up the recommendations that we've just been talking about today, and seeing that they do actually make a difference.

I thank Suzy Davies for that. There were lessons derived directly in Wales, and partly by the authors of the report to which Lynne Neagle referred as a result of the Bridgend cluster, and one of them was in responsible media reporting of such events. And I think that we have been lucky here in Wales that we have had a local media who have been prepared to absorb the lessons of that suicide cluster and haven't subsequently reported events in a way that draws alarmist attention to them that ends up affecting vulnerable young people to take action that otherwise they may not have contemplated.

And Suzy Davies is surely right, Llywydd, that it is very difficult to build complete protection into any system dealing with human beings. But we know that there are factors that help and we know there are factors that hinder people who are vulnerable and who are contemplating drastic action in their own lives. I think we have learned some of the lessons here in Wales and part of the reason that this report does not refer to a cluster phenomenon amongst the 33 young people whose cases it reviewed is partly the result of some of those lessons being absorbed. 

As part of the Programme for International Student Assessment report recently when the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development asked pupils about their feelings about life experience, it was discovered that 54 per cent of pupils in Wales occasionally or always feel down. The average internationally is 39 per cent. Sixty three per cent of pupils occasionally or always feel anxious. Now, these are results that are quite frightening, I'm sure you would agree with me on that. You have committed to make well-being and mental health a national priority, but where is the sign that we are moving in that direction in a significant manner in your draft budget?

Well, there are many examples in the draft budget, Llywydd, which demonstrate what we're doing to respond to the contents of the PISA report and what we're doing in the schools in particular to strengthen the services that are available on a daily basis to respond to those children who do feel down and don't feel that they have the future that they would wish to see. And that is why, in the draft budget, there is more funding—I will turn to English.

There's more money in the draft budget for suicide and self-harm services, to strengthen further the services that we have in schools through school counselling. And the school counselling service is a good example of how intervention of that sort can assist young people without them then needing to be referred on to further and more intensive services. Eighty seven per cent of the 11,365 young people who received counselling services in our schools last year needed no further intervention; 3 per cent of them only needed a referral on to a specialist mental health service, and that's why the draft budget invests more money in that whole-school approach, exactly for the reasons that Siân Gwenllian quite rightly points to.