Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health what progress his Department is making on the national roll-out of the Individual Placement and Support programme.

NHS England has committed to doubling the reach of Individual Placement and Support (IPS) services by 2020/21. This will contribute to the target of helping up to 29,000 more people per year living with mental health problems to find or stay in work as recommended in the Five Year Forward View for Mental Health which is available at:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Mental-Health-Taskforce-FYFV-final.pdf

To date, NHS England has commissioned the NHS Benchmarking Network and Centre for Mental Health to undertake a data collection exercise on activity in IPS and Supported Employment services within 2016/17 to provide an indication of current access to such services.

NHS England is preparing to allocate transformation funding identified in the Five Year Forward View for Mental Health and the subsequent Implementation Plan: ‘Implementing the Five Year Forward View for Mental Health’ for the commissioning of IPS services to selected sustainability and transformation partnership footprints from April 2018. The Plan is available at:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/fyfv-mh.pdf

To support this, the Joint Work and Health Unit has invested in an implementation support project called ‘IPS Grow’ that aims to compliment this expansion by enabling these services to be as effective as possible in supporting people who want to enter and stay in work.

The Joint Work and Health Unit, in partnership with NHS England, will also be carrying out two research trials to find out whether a modified IPS model can help people with physical and/or mental health conditions get into, and stay in, paid competitive employment.