Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what plans his Department has to monitor progress on achieving the target of increasing the size of the mental health workforce by 2020-21.

The Five Year Forward View for Mental Health, led by NHS England, sets out an ambitious agenda to transform mental health services by 2020/21. To support the delivery of the Five Year Forward View, Health Education England published Stepping Forward to 2020/21: Mental Health Workforce Plan for England in July 2017 which sets out the steps that will be taken to achieve the additional workforce numbers required to deliver the Five Year Forward View.

Implementation of the Workforce Plan is being led by Health Education England through their Mental Health Workforce Implementation Board. The Board is working with the arm’s length bodies and the Department to develop a series of metrics that can be used to monitor progress against the published plan.