Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, with reference to the NHS England document, Next Steps on the Five Year Forward View published in March 2017, what recent progress the NHS has made on meeting the objective for an additional 60,000 people to access (a) psychological and (b) talking therapies for common mental health conditions during 2017-18.

Progress against the targets for mental health services improvement, set out within the Five Year Forward View for Mental Health, are tracked on the Mental Health Five Year Forward View Dashboard which is available at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/publication/mental-health-five-year-forward-view-dashboard/

This shows that the National Health Service is on track to meet the targets for Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT).

The latest ‘Psychological Therapies, Annual report on the use of IAPT services - England, 2016/17’, which was published on 30 November, can be found at the following link:

http://www.digital.nhs.uk/catalogue/PUB30157

This shows that in 2016/17, 965,379 people entered treatment, resulting in an annualised access rate of 15.79%, exceeding the 15% target. Monthly data published by NHS Digital, up to and including August 2017, show that for 2017/18, 415,437 people have so far entered treatment.

Complete data for 2017/18 will not be available until early 2018/19.