LABOUR shadow minister Luciana Berger slammed Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt yesterday for ignoring a looming “car crash” in mental-health services.

Ms Berger demanded that the government take urgent action in response to a stark warning from Professor Sue Bailey, the outgoing president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

Professor Bailey told the BBC: “It’s a car crash that we are sleepwalking into — well, we are not even sleepwalking, we are being driven into it by the way the system is run.”

She pleaded for more funding and scolded Mr Hunt for failing to take up offers to go and see mental health services in action.

But the haughty Mr Hunt retorted that he was “proud” of his record on mental health, although he conceded that there were “some real pressures on mental-health delivery.”

He claimed that he was “out there every week learning about these problems from doctors and nurses.”