Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what estimate he has made of the change in expenditure on mental health in all areas covered by the capped expenditure process.

The National Health Service and wider health system has examined how to sustain and improve care – which produced the NHS Five Year Forward View. The Government committed to providing an additional £10 billion in real terms by 2020-21 to back the NHS’s plan, enabling it to deliver key priorities like seven day care, improved access to cancer treatments and better mental health services.

All public services, local NHS areas need to live within the budget agreed – otherwise they effectively take up resources that could be spent on GPs, mental health care, and cancer treatment. As part of their financial planning, NHS England and NHS Improvement have been running a process to look at how a small number of areas could do more to balance their financial plans, as many already have.

This Government is investing over £1 billion on mental health per year.