Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the effect of the delays in the publication of the Mental Health Services Monthly Statistics on the ability of relevant stakeholders to understand the experience of people living with mental illness.

There was a pre-announced delay of two weeks from 13 January to 27 January 2022 for publication of the January provisional Mental Health Services Data Set (MHSDS). This publication was the first one to be based on a new version of the dataset, which involved mental health providers collecting new information and NHS Digital developing its system to process this. Delays in this development led to the two-week postponement of the provisional publication. NHS Digital has confirmed that as the development has now concluded, standard monthly publication processes have resumed, and the February MHSDS was published on 10 February 2022 as scheduled.

No such assessment has been made regarding the effect of the delays in the publication of the Mental Health Services Monthly Statistics. The timeliness of this publication remains a priority and key learning and improvements have been identified from this project which will be used to implement future dataset version changes.