Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what estimate his Department has made of the number of children who live in insecure housing who have been referred to specialist care for serious mental health problems.

The mental health services dataset on the number of children living in insecure housing referred to specialist care for serious mental health conditions shows that 3,221 children were referred in 2020/21 and 3,757 from April to November in 2021/22. However, it should be noted that there has been an increase in the number of providers submitting this data since 2018 and subsequent improvements in data quality.