Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to accelerate access to psychological therapies for adults with long-term common mental health conditions.
We continue to expand access to talking and psychological therapies through the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme. Data from 2019/20 shows that there were 1.69 million referrals to IAPT in England and 1.17 million people started a course of treatment within this year.
In addition, we continue to meet our waiting time targets for IAPT. Latest figures for August 2020 indicate that 89.1% of people completing treatment waited less than 6 weeks against a target of 75% and 97.8% waited less than 18 weeks, against a target of 87.5%.