A LEADING mental health charity is making an eleventh-hour appeal for funds to save its national telephone helpline.

Sane, which is closing two regional call centres with the loss of 120 volunteers after government funding dried up, believes that it will struggle to keep its London centre running without more funds.

The crisis is the latest to befall the charity founded 19 years ago by Marjorie Wallace, a campaigner driven to create the Saneline phone service in response to the failures of the care in the community programme. It now has 50,000 callers a year.

The Conservatives will raise the funding of Saneline in an adjournment debate in the Commons today after the Department of Health refused to renew an annual grant of £1 million for the next financial year. Mrs Wallace is adamant that the Government has let down the charity, although the Department of Health said that the two-year funding deal of £2 million, which ends this month, was given on the understanding that the charity would become self-sufficient.

The department said that it was making £5 million available to the 70-organisation Mental Health Helplines Partnership. It added that Sane had failed to bid for funds in the usual way for the coming financial year.

Sane denies this. Mrs Wallace said: “Without Sane, thousands of people in crisis will find themselves with nowhere else to turn for help.”

She denied that becoming self-sufficient was part of the funding deal and added that a late payment by the department of the second £1 million had made it impossible for Sane to raise extra funds.

Mrs Wallace added: “Sane has been crippled in its fundraising from other sources, being unable to explain the deficit in its accounts.”

The Royal College of Psychiatrists has backed Mrs Wallace’s campaign to raise at least £500,000 to keep the Saneline going. Mike Shooter, president of the college, said: “It is unthinkable that such an organisation should lose funding.”

A department spokeswoman said: “We have given Saneline more funding than any other mental health phoneline.” She said that at 50,000 calls per year, Saneline handled 1 per cent of annual mental health-related helpline calls.

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