Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to reduce waiting lists for mental health therapies in Yorkshire and the Humber.

The Government is committed to reducing waiting times for mental health therapies across England.

Improving Access to Psychological Therapy waiting time standards continue to improve and we are consistently exceeding the targets. According to data used in the 2016-17 IAPT annual report, 98.2% of those people completing treatment waited less than 18 weeks for their treatment to start in England against a target of 95% and 87.5% of people completing treatment waited less than six weeks against a target of 75%. In 2016-17, 965,379 people entered treatment against a target of 900,000.

Updates on clinical commissioning group (CCG) performance against these are published on the Five Year Forward View for Mental Health Dashboard is available at:

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

Leeds CCGs have put forward plans to make additional investment in their commissioned talking therapies service, which will help to reduce waiting times further and achieve the national access target of 19% for 2018/19.